Help! Having a crisis here

[James Mckenzie]

.Hi,
>I have a bit of a problem.
>Something went wrong with my laptop. Sudden I could not login anymore. KDM
>kept reporting dat it had some kind of error (A critical error occurred.
>Please look at KDM's logfile(s) for more information or contact your system
>administrator.) and I could not login anymore. However, when I try to login
>over for instance ssh, I cannot either. So I think it is probably not a
>problem with KDM, but with the login. I cannot login under my normal user or
>under the root.
Sounds like your /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow files could be corrupt.  Also, the /etc/group file could be damaged which will deny you access to the system although you could login.  What exactly is the error message that you are receiving?  This is not easy to recover from if you did not make backup copies of these files.  I suggest booting with the rescue cd disk (you did make one, right?) and trying to fix the files.

>Do you have any idea how to get in and what steps to check what exactly went
>wrong and how to fix it?
>I think something went wrong with some files on my system, since I had some
>problems with the disk also, however when I check the disk now, it's clean.
>It could be that login files were damaged or something.

Definately looks like the login files are damaged.

>It also tried using Knoppix to get on the system, which works and I can read
>the kdm.log file under /var/log, but I cannot find any useful information
>there, except for some keyboard error, but that is probably not it.

You can get in with Knoppix which is a good thing.  However, you need to fix the passwd and shadow files.  I do not know how to do this but I do know enough to have a backup of them.  


James McKenzie
A Proud User of Linux!