On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Roshan George <ros...@arjie.com> wrote: > Unfortunately, on Debian this leads to a deadly situation. In the event > of a failed fsck, Debian gives you the bog standard, "Enter root > password to continue (or press Ctrl-D)" message. The problem is that the > root user is locked. There is simply no password. `Ctrl-D` just restarts > the OS.
This is *very easy* to recover. I've done this several times. 1. In your boot loader, pass the "init=/bin/sh" option and boot your kernel 2. when the kernel completes boot, it will immediately drop you into a root shell. Here you remount your root fs rw, run passwd to reset root password. See below. 3. mount /proc; swapon -a 4. mount -o remount,rw / # mounts root fs rw, if this fails run fsck 5. run passwd to reset the root password. You are already root so you will not be promoted for current password. 6. mount -o remount,ro / 7. exec /sbin/init # will continue boot procedure 8. Once system boots up, I recommend you reboot immediately to ensure system is up following correct boot procedure. > Any advice would be appreciated. I'm having that horrible sinking > feeling right now. This made plea me get out of bed, power up my laptop and post. Let me know how it goes. - Raja _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
