I was having problems with Gnome. Everywhere I looked people said try dropline gnome. So I installled dropline. After a reboot I could not log on to the pc. When I typed my login name I would not get the prompt to type my password in bash, it would wait a couple of seconds then jump right back into the prompt for the login name. I have another computer with slack and I took the harddrive out of my dropline corrupted pc and made it the slave in this other pc.
I have two questions:

One, what did dropline do to my slack and how do I correct it?

Two, what do I have to do to read the second harddrive to correct the dropline problem and and save the files on it?

I use dropline but just for solving evolution dependencies, I suggest you to use the select what packages will be installed feature of dropline when doing install/upgrades.

For now, I guess that dropline has overwritten some important packages in your system, specially them about security.
Ok you have your hd as slave and another slack running. Make a directory like /mnt/back

mount /dev/<your root partition from slave hd> /mnt/back
cd /mnt/back/var/cache/dropline-installer
ls *.tgz > ~/dropline.log
cd
cat dropline.log

From the file dropline.log in your current directory, you have an idea about packages installed by dropline. You can use the chroot command to removepkg them like chroot /mnt/back removepkg fam-2.7.0-i686-2dl.tgz and replace them by the officals ones (use chroot too for installpkg/upgradepkg)

If you searc on this forum, it is almost impossible to remove every last vestige of dropline short of formatting and reinstalling. Besides the software packages it also made many changes to config files. The introduction of PAM is not trivial to the slackware system.

The introduction of PAM is not trivial to the slackware system.
What is the authentication system in slackware for login so? Do man passwd you will see.

[edit]
Maybe I did not understand well, if you means that PAM is required, I agree with you

I wouldn't agree on using dropline. Check out linuxpackages.net for some useful ideas why.

Thanks for your help folks. You have pointed me in the right direction. I think I have correctly added my hdb2 partition to fstab so I don't have to keep mounting it. I am not familier with chroot yet so that will wait a while.

It shall be possible to salvage your Slack installation or at least restore original login by upgrading shadow package with the Slackware's original one.

Nothing more simple : chroot = change root
So if you want install a package for your mounted partition that contains slackware system you have to use the installpkg from this partition or at least you have to make sure packages will be installed in mounted partition (and in proper directories).

If you just use the installpkg from the running system, packages will be installed in the partition of the actual system.

chroot is the tool that you need as it will change temporarly the actual root partition (/) to any directory you want (/mnt/hd for example)

chroot /mnt/hd upgradepkg glibc-2.3.2-i486-6.tgz

This will upgrade glibc package in the system mounted in /mnt/hd

Thanks again! I think I might have it fixed. I still have to change the hdd back to master. I am too lazy to do that right now. I mounted the hdb2 partition in /home/user/hdd. After uninstalling the shadow package that was in the dropline-installer directory. I downloaded the shadow package from the slackware website and used installpkg to install it, something like this.

chroot /home/user/hdd/ installpkg home/user/downloads/shadow-4.0.3-i486-11.tgz

I didn't get any error messeges and it look as if the install went well. I just hope I got the chroot syntax correct.

Personally I don't use Dropline. Even thou it looks cool as hell, it just slooooows down my laptop, like if I was using Fedora. One thing you could do is to ftp to sourceforge and download and instal yourself the dropline packages that you really like, like evolution....

Good luck with fixing your problem.

Figa

I see it was a dropline install on a slackware-current... Last time I tried to install dropline on a slackware 10 box it would not install. The dropline-installer reported back that I had slackware 10 install and that dropline was not compatible with it (slack 10>) and asked if I wanted to load it anyway (force).
I would assume that dropline is not for use on a "current" (unstable/development/test) install and that a slack 10 version will be out shortly. So if you install it where it is not intended for things will break.
Also with a "current" system you have no guarantee ANYTHING will work as it is NOT a production or stable release. With current you run the risk of a broke system everyday as current is changed nearly daily (see current change logs).
I have stated this before... If you want a stable system that has been tested and is supported by almost everything out there you should go with the last release version (slack 10) and the last stable kernel release (2.4.26). If you read up on the tech of linux everything above kernel 2.4.26 is still considered in development.
And if you read up on unix distro trees you will see "currents" are pre-release.

"when living on the edge it is easy to fall off the side"

olscratch>The chroot utility change root (/) to the directory you specified, so when you do :

It changes root to /home/user/hdd, then it runs /home/user/hdd/sbin/installpkg with the argument
/home/user/hdd/home/user/downloads/shadow-4.0.3-i486-11.tgz

Seen ? So if this command went well, I assume you copied your downloaded package to :
/home/user/hdd/home/user/downloads/