Problem with root

[Guest duffmckagan]

Whenever I try to do anything that requires root privileges, Mandriva pops up a dialog, requiring me to enter the Root Password.

 

But when I enter the *Correct* Password, it says -- Incorrect Password.

 

When I try to su - to root from Konsole, I get the following:

 

[amit@Copperskull ~]$ su -

Password:

su: warning: cannot change directory to /root: Permission denied

su: cannot set groups: Operation not permitted

[amit@Copperskull ~]$

Why is that?

 

Also, some days ago, i started using Mandriva back again. (Before that, everything used to work fine. I simply didn't use Mandriva in the Interim (used another Linux Distro.)

 

Didn't chmod or chown any folder pertaining to Mandriva (from other distro.)

 

I also tried recreating the user, and checked the permissions. It seems to be fine.

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[ianw1974]

One thing you can try to do is boot from the Mandriva CD/DVD, press F1 and type linux rescue.

 

That will boot, and give a menu, choose option to get to console screen.

 

Now, need to find out where your "/" partition is, so type:

 

fdisk -l /dev/hda

 

this will list your partitions, if not then try sda instead, depending on hard disk type IDE or SCSI/SATA. Now, once you've found which one it is:

 

mount /dev/hdax /mnt

 

replace x with the number of the partition. Then type the following:

 

chroot /mnt /bin/bash
passwd root (reset to what you want it to be)
chown -R root:root /root
exit
umount /mnt
reboot

 

and see if that helps.

[paul]

or boot into single user mode

 

when lilo/grub pops up type

linux single