Help! Having a crisis here

[J.L. Coenders]

On Tuesday 23 November 2004 05:40 pm, James Mckenzie wrote:
> .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!

I am not recieving much, except for the error above in KDM. When I go to 
runlevel 3 and try to login then it does not accept my login. It does not 
even ask for my password.

I have a backup of yesterday of the /etc, however the shadow file is not in 
it. Does anyone know why? It's a standard tar czf of the entire directory.

- Jeroen