I accidentally corrupted the /lib/libcrypto.so.6 on my Fedora Core 5 laptop, and now I cannot boot up the machine. As it boots, it prints out a bunch of error messages regarding the corrupted libcrypto.so.6 file and then it goes to a black screen with a cursor that has a spinning wheel. It keeps spinning forever.

I believe the files on the disk are all still intact, but I just cannot log in.

How do I restore this system file? Can I restore it using the FC5 installation disks?

I dont want to erase the data files on the disk....

Please help!

Why don't you try booting off the CD in single usermode and mouting the filesystem as writable and copy back the libcrypto.so file?

Thanks for your reply. I am thinking of booting off the FC5 CDs and selecting the upgrade option to upgrade the existing system files but leaving the user files alone. Would that work? I assume it will just replace the corrupted libcrypto with the one from the CD. Since the CDs and what's on the disk are both FC5, the rest of the system is basically unchanged.

It would be at the screen shown at this webpage: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/fedora...ng-system.html

How do you boot in single user mode in FC5, as you described? I dont believe FC5 have a LIVE CD.

Thanks again...

You could try booting up with the kernel option "init=/bin/bash". This may get you into a root shell without logging in. After mounting the partitions with the live systems root (/) on /mnt, you can chroot there, and then run "bash -l" to replace your PATH and other variables. Now you can try replacing the bad file. The libcrypto library is needed to encrypt your password to compare with the /etc/shadow entry. That is why you couldn't log in.

You could also delete the password hash from the /etc/shadow entry and reboot. I'm not certain if using a null password would bypass libcrypto.

Also, the install/rescue disks environment may require libcrypto itself, and could be a source for this file. I'm not certain what would happen if the file were updated since the install.

If you have access to the package the supplies libcrypto, you can run rpm2cpio on the package and extract it's contents with cpio. Then copy over the bad file(s) with the good one.

So there are a number of things you can try before reinstalling with an upgrade option. The latter works best if /home is on it's own partition.