Ooh, I've had stuff like this happen to me.
One way is to pull the drive out of the box, stick it into another box, change
the bios to recognize it. Start second box, mount your disabled drive at some
arbitrary point, then massage the passwd file.
I've successfully fscked drives that users have turned off at any old time, and
have run Lilo for those with a munged boot sector.
It's a bit troublesome and involved, but it's quicker than a reinstall and
restore.
I guess a better way would be not so much a rescue disk, but a rescue
partition. It would have fdisk, fsck, LILO, and what else? I've thought about
this, but don't know where to go from here. Any thoughts?
Mark
> I was using the KDE utility for removing users s. It appears when the utility
>closed it also clobbered the entry
> for root. There was an /etc/passwd.bak file created
> Has anyone had this happen to them before? Is there a way of fixing it short
> of a complete reinstall?
