I set up Debian 3.1 the other day, and have been messing around trying to get everything working properly... Everything was fine, until i re-partitioned an externel hard drive, and formated it... everything worked fine, even put files on it... it wouldn't unmount because it said it was busy even though it wasn't doing anything so i went ahead and used the su command and the reboot command to restart my computer... when it came up i loged in as my user, and x started up normaly... But i needed to do something as super user (don't remember now what) and i typed su as normal, and it asked for a password, i gave it my root password, and it said

hutch@hutch1:/bin$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
Sorry.

so i tried to use something that needed a root password, like the package manager, and it said

Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic as user root:
Wrong password.

But, i can go into consol via alt-ctrl F1, and login as root just fine... Any ideas? I would post some log, but i don't know where to start... Thanks

Usually you need to be a member of the group "wheel" to use "su", make sure your user is in the "wheel" group in /etc/group...

Is it possible you have numlock on or somehow remapped your keyboard to another language by accident?

If you can't log in as root you might as well reinstall everything bro. I doubt a keyboard remap would have much of an effect. Do make sure your Caps Lock is off.

well everyting was where it was supost to be, but since i could still login through single user mode i just backed everything up, and a day latter have it up and running agin...