I recently acquired a somewhat older computer, so I installed vectorlinux 5.1 (the regular edition not SOHO). Everything went smoothly until I had to login after the installation. I am 100% positive that I had the password correct, but I kept getting a Login incorrect message. I couldn't login with root or with the user I created during the installation. I also tried logging in on the console, but that didn't work either. I figured that (unlikely as it is) I must have typed in the passwords incorrectly during installation, so I tried resetting the passwords by editing /etc/shadow (I did this using knoppix). Somehow, that didn't work either. As a final step, I reinstalled vectorlinux without setting up a password for root, but I still couldn't log in.

If anyone knows I would like to know 1:

Why is this happening?

And 2:

What can I do to be able to log in?

try going into single user mode. and add a new user and they try to log on.
to go into single user mode, hit e when grub loads, and go to the line where kernel is meant to load and append "1" to it

Unfortunately, Vectorlinux doesn't offer grub as a choice during installation (as far as I saw anyway), so hitting e has no effect.

I found a workaround. I booted in runlevel 2, and I was able to log in from there. After that I just used .

So, it works but I still have no idea why I can't login in runlevel 5.