root problems! - Solved!

[Alan Dayley]

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Thanks all for your help!

I tried to use appended commands to bring up an alternate shell.  It worked 
but it would only mount the hard drive file system as read-only.  I tried to 
change the "ro" in the GRUB link to "rw" but that didn't seem to solve it.

So, out came my Red Hat 7.3 System Administrator's Survival CD.  Booting with 
that it had an option during the boot to mount the file systems as 
read-write.  I went to my hard drive /bin and did the "chmod 755 bash" 
command.  Rebooted and all is well!  Nice little rescue CD, that one!

Well, I now know not to use chmod because I THINK I know what it will do.

Alan

On Friday 27 September 2002 10:09 am, Voltage Spike wrote:
> Yeah, I cringed when the first response was to reboot the machine . . .
> I knew someone would get upset over that one.
>
> First of all, try starting using an alternate shell.  If you use LILO,
> I believe the command you are looking for is:
>
> linux init=/bin/ash
>
> OR
>
> linux init=/bin/tcsh
>
> OR
>
> linux init=/bin/ksh
>
> If you are lucky, then you will have one of these alternate shells
> installed (very likely).  If not, as noted, you will need to boot using
> a recovery disk.  If you have the install CDs you should be able to use
> them to recover things.  If you can't figure out how, then don't
> hesitate to ask.  (Hint: at a very minimum, you might be able to Alt-F2
> on the graphical screen to get a shell.  You can probably mount, fix,
> and reboot, but it will take a bit o' knowledge.)
>
> In either case, you can fix bash when you get a shell by typing:
>
> chmod 755 /bin/bash
>
> Good luck.  If you don't get it fixed, someone at the InstallFest can
> get it done in minutes.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend, but
> if you have a "Linux" hat (not "GNU/Linux") then you will soon find out
> who knows their way around. :-)
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