Hey

I wanted another user to be able to write to "/" but by mistake I made the owner of all the files in "/" to another user. I noticed and tried to change it back and I did. Just in case, I restarted and now Im stuck at the logon screen. It displays and when I try to enter my password, it goes black and just goes back to the logon screen.

What would be the best way to fix this? A format would be ideal (nothing important on it) but its been a couple of days of configuring this server and configuring it AGAIN would just piss me off......

I just want to enter the OS and be able to access (and acutally do stuff)

Ive been able to access a root shell (thank god)

would a

chown -R root:root /

fix everything?

Yes, it will make the owner and group as root for all the files and directories under / recursively.

Running it now. I thought I was going to reformat this.......

Nothing. Same thing login comes up, I enter my password, black screen, login again comes up, Io enter again my password, black screen, login come up.........etc infinite.


Another issue perhaps?

Changing ownership of all files to root will not fix the problem. Do not do it. If your first command was recursively, with "-R" option, then it can be hard to fix (first try to change your user home directory ownership to you), depending on what ditribution you use, what programs installed, etc. Please specify also if you changed only owner or permissions too?

Well, sudo was broken but I have been able to fix it.

I changed owner AND permissions. I changed the ownership of all files to root (like you said NOT to do; Sorry, did it before you replied) and still the desktop does not show up.


I know the system is problably 90% broken but is there any way to get back into the desktop?

Another thing, I change to the terminal on the login screen (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and I cannot login as root .

I can change to root (the user) once logged in though.

Back into the desktop Man that took some time!


I tried different things and changing /tmp to 777 did the trick.

OK, all of that is nice for being able to get back in but it doesn't really solve things, right? You still have to reset all ownership and permissions. How you do that depends on your distribution. Either list it in your control panel or post here if unsure what to do.

My MySQL server doesnt start so fuck it; Im reformatting it and reinstall it from sratch.

Too bad Ubuntu doesnt have a System Restore like Windows.

Ubuntu thought I put it, sorry about that.

Im reformatting and reinstalling but I havent hit the next button yet.........

Formatting now.

Word of advice,... make your /home partition separate from / , that is, if you don't already. In that instance, you only have to format the / partition, and can leave /home intact... Fixing just the /home partition's permissions and migrating data after a reinstall or upgrade is easier than having to wipe the drive and resort to backups.

PS: 2nd piece of advice,... instead of changing permissions, you should have just added admin rights to the other user on the sudoers list, or used group permissions to do the same thing, provided that kind of permission structure was compatible with whatever software you were using.