Take a live CD with same architecture as your currently machine. D chroot is one solution ... i think you need to do that from knoppix live cd if the architecture is the same as your machine ; knoppix is i386 so If your machine is i386 or amd64 with mutiarch will work
boot the live cd open a terminal as root create the partiontable on /mnt directory of the live Cd for instance / partion as /mnt and home partition as /mnt/home and etc. now mount the devices of your HDD to /mnt/ i.e. for / partion mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ alright , as we go now ... chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash and now is on your debian and you can change the owner to root ... chown -hR root /etc On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 04:43:29PM -0800, Gary Roach wrote: > I've done the unthinkable. I accidentally changed root to qroot in > my /etc/passwd file and then proceeded to log out of root. All of > the files in /etc were changed to owner qroot and the root password > doesn't work any more. I have a new Knoppix CD and a new Debian > network install CD. Can I use either of these to edit the passwd > file and correct the problem. If so, how. > > Thanks in advance > > Gary R. > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a > subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > listmas...@lists.debian.org > Archive: http://lists.debian.org/50b40cb1.8060...@verizon.net > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121127115538.GA5666@thinkpad