Chaitanya Krishna A wrote:
Ya, I did chroot to my filesystem on the hard disk. I booted in the Rescue mode. Then mounted my root partition /dev/sda1 to /new and chroot'd into /new and then gave passwd and gave a new passwd. It said passwd changed, but still no improvement. When I as user give su, it still gives the same error, i.e., $ su su: cannot set groups: Operation not permitted
Ya I did make a backup. But then I think the harm has already been done to
the
files before I made a backup.
Another lesson learned. Make Backups BEFORE something bad happens. (^-^)
If you have only changed the file permissions then the damage is not really significant. Many years ago I remember that I accidentally gzipped all the files in the /etc directory and I also panicked. Fortunately it was a test system with nothing installed yet.
As I told in the first mail, I meddled with the passwd and shadow files before I made a backup. I deleted the x in root entry in /etc/passwd and made the root line look as root:::: in /etc/shadow. This I did from the rescue disk.
Anything else that can be done?
Sure, restore the root entry in etc/passwd. It should look like this: root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash When you deleted all entries you also deleted the UID/GID values, so naturally the system is a bit baffled when it tries to set UID and GID. (^-^) Sandy -- List replies only please! Please address PMs to: news-reply (@) japantest (.) homelinux (.) com