I've been playing around with different ways to add a linux machine to Active Directory. I ran into some issues with samba so I decided to reinstall it. Then I ran into issues reinstalling samba and I uninstalled Winbind. After I uninstalled winbind every time i tried to sudo i got 3 incorrect password errors in a row, as in sudo reboot, then 3 of the same password errors simultaneouly popped up. I decided to reboot, now I cannot log in at all. When I type my username, it pauses for a few minutes and then gives me incorrect password error, it never even lets me enter a password, this happens after i type in my username only and it happens for my user and root.

As luck would have it this is a test machine so I have no qualm in reformatting this machine. I have accessed the drive with knoppix, but cannot change anything on the files on the HD.

Any ideas? And does anyone know an easy way to get a linux machine hooked up to AD where it accepts the AD creds etc..

Which Ubuntu 8? (There's two releases with several configurations each.)
How did you install, attempt to reinstall, samba?
How did you install then uninstall winbind?
Have you tried booting to rescue mode?

Why not?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ActiveDirectoryHowto The difficulty for non windows machines to authenticate to AD is a kind of vendor lockin - i.e. it's deliberate on MSs part. We expect the situation to improve as the various compatibility deals start to bear fruit. Linux will usually manage with the free protocol parts of AD - don't expect full support.