Red Hat 6.2 linux help...

[MetroRider]

hi guys,

a problem i am having lately is with a red hat linux 6.2 box that wont boot up cleanly for me anymore after it had one bad restart 2 weeks ago. every time it is about to boot, it does the hard-drive check for not unmounting cleanly, gets 100% done, then wants to go into root mode for me to do some maintenance work on it. however, the problem is that it will NOT accept the root password. the password i am using has numerical digits in it towards the end of the password, and whenever i enter in the first number, it asks me to try again. i was able to boot the machine up with my Knoppix cd, and crack the root password just to make sure it hadnt changed, yet when i tried again to boot back up, it still will not take the password.

at this point, i feel that a reinstall of the system may be best, however i would really not want to do that at this point. it has all the right settings set up, and at this moment, its main job is acting as a print server to another unix box. now maybe it is just me in not wanting to set the printer settings up again, or not wanting to mess with the unix box (which is a SCO UNIX box) but if i could just get theh red hat box to boot normally again, it would help out a lot.

thanks again in advance for any ideas, suggestions, tips, and your help here...

-David

 

[Nothinman]

Since you can get to the disk in knoppix just run e2fsck from knoppix, after it finishes mount the partition somewhere then umount it, that way it'll have been cleanly umounted and won't be checked on bootup.

 

[MetroRider]

hi nothingman,

you make an interesting point. when i was booted under knoppix, i did mount the drive to get the /etc/shadow file off of it. however, at this point and time, i do not recall if i did use the 'umount' command to unmount the drive. i also know that i definitely did not use the 'e2fsck' either. when i get to the machine, i will give that a shot.

thanks!

 

[N11]

I'd give the system rescue option a try, off of the cd type linux rescue and from there change your root password.

 

[MetroRider]

Originally posted by: N11
I'd give the system rescue option a try, off of the cd type linux rescue and from there change your root password.

and it would work fine if i used a newer red hat 7.2/7.3/8.0 cd? i dont have the cd's for the older 6.x line of redhat, and have never used the system rescue option either before.

tia...

 

[MetroRider]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Since you can get to the disk in knoppix just run e2fsck from knoppix, after it finishes mount the partition somewhere then umount it, that way it'll have been cleanly umounted and won't be checked on bootup.

THX again for your advice, nothingman. i was able to try that out today, and it worked like a charm. e2fsck reported some initial errors, but was able to correct it. i then mounted and unmounted the drive as you stated and rebooted. upon bootup, Red Hat had no problems with the partition either.

btw, i figured out the password problem as well. the last character of the password is the number '3', and on the keyboard i am using, the '3' button doesn't work, as it instead acts and functions like the 'ENTER' key, so go figure why i had the initial problem :/

-David