[SOLVED] I just lost root acess

Adol · 02-09-2012, 06:04 AM

Hello,

Not really sure what happened. Everything was working well. I took a lot of time to build a gentoo machine exactly the way I wanted it and have been using it for almost a month now.

I just rebooted and now its saying my su password is not good. Permission denied.

It seems that I just lost root access to my machine. Is there anything I can do? I really dont want to build everything again because it takes a long time.

acid_kewpie · 02-09-2012, 06:33 AM

reboot, at your grub bootloader menu, hit e to edit, and add a "1" to the kernel options line. This will log you right in as root and then you can run "passwd" to set it again.

Adol · 02-09-2012, 08:01 AM

Thank you very much.

I was able to start as root and change my password but I still cant get root access when I log into my regular system.

I keep geting

Code:

petreuss@linux ~ $ su
Password: 
su: Permission denied

Cedrik · 02-09-2012, 08:17 AM

Maybe it is other error than password error

I mean try a wrong password to see if error is the same

Adol · 02-09-2012, 08:24 AM

Thank you everyone. I got it working.

I tried to add my user to the cdrom group by using:

Code:

usermod -G cdrom (username)

I thought that it would append the cdrom group to my username but instead it put my user in only one group.

I fixed it by going to root from boot up with acid_kewpie`s suggestion and adding my user to all of the groups:

Code:

usermod -G users,wheel,audio,cdrom (username)

In my case the wheel group is important for getting root acess.

Thank you very much.

Cedrik · 02-09-2012, 08:32 AM

Next time use -a (append) option for usermod