thanks mike for your help! however, seems things are a bit royally screwed..
i tried this method and i'm taken to a debian log-in. when i enter the
password, i get logged in ok, but then i receive the error messages:
cannot execute /bin/bash: no such file or directory
then i'm returned to the prompt. the only way i can get out of this cycle is
by booting into BIOS, but apparently the laptop BIOS won't allow me to boot
from CD, even when specified with a store-bought debian boot CD - i just
load straight back into linux, back to this login problem. (this is a
toshiba tecra 8000 - i orginally installed from a DOS prompt). is there a
way out of this loop? it seems that, a) i have screwed up my debian system
very badly, b) my BIOS won't allow me to boot from CD, c) i can't get past
any prompts to make changes to the system. is there a solution to this? or
do i know have an unusable computer?
thanks for the help,
nick
--
hillips wrote:
>> hello again list,
>>
>> so i'm not sure how it happened but i've managed to lock myself out of my
>> system. i had installed debian 2.2.19 and installed enlightenment as the
>> deskop manager and everything was going ok. i tried installing a program
>> called jmax, and through a bunch of dependency problems ending up giving up
>> -- it requested libc6.2.4, which in turn requested locales 2.4, etc. etc. so
>> eventually i thought better of trying out all these unstable packages. so i
>> uninstalled them, then when i logged out of enlightenmnet, i know login to a
>> a graphical login screen that says "X Window System" -- before I'm pretty
>> sure the same login screen said "Debian user" or something like that. When I
>> try any of my passwords, they now don't work! I'm not sure what the problem
>> could do, and I have no way of getting past this screen to fix it! Has
>> something gone wrong with X Server or with XF86Setup? Does anyone have any
>> suggestions?
>
> Firstly, this sounds like a debian-user thing :)
>
> Second, it sounds like a problem with your authentication system, rather
> than with the X-server. Just to be sure, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to
> a text prompt and try to login from there (both as root and as a user).
> If that doesn't work, your PAM is most likely broken.
>
> The easiest way I can think of to fix it, (OTTOMH,) is to do the
> following:
>
> * Reboot the system. At the LILO prompt, enter the name of the image
> you wish to boot, followed by 'init=/bin/sh' This will bypass
> authentication and boot you straight into a shell, running as root.
> * remount the root filesystem read-write ('mount / -o remount,rw') so
> that you can do what you need.
> * What happens next depends on what's broken. Try running passwd and
> resetting your root password. Reboot the machine normally. If you
> still can't log in, then there's something wrong with your PAM
> system. The quickest way to fix that is to re-do the upgrade you
> interrupted. To do that, reboot with /bin/sh as above. You'll have
> to mount /var (if applicable), and bring up the network interface
> before you can upgrade.
>
> HTH,
> - --
> Mike Alborn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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