Mark Phillips wrote:

> I installed Mandrake 8.1 awhile ago on a spare hard rive for my laptop.
> I had to use my Windows hard drive for a project, so I have not used the 
> Linux
> hard drive for a few months. I tried to log on to the Linux drive today, 
> and found
> that both my root and user account passwords have expired! I cannot log in
> to any account.
> 
> I tried to set the date back a few months during boot-up, but the OS 
> keep setting
> the date back to today, and I still cannot log in.
> 
> Do I have to fdisk and then reinstall, or is there a way to "break into"
> the system and log into the system?

append the word "single" without quotes to the end of your boot line (how to do 
this depends on if you are using grub or lilo).