From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Sep 1 18:13: 1 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pc-62-31-80-67-ll.blueyonder.co.uk (pc-62-31-80-67-ll.blueyonder.co.uk [62.31.80.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 9F49737B40B for ; Sat, 1 Sep 2001 18:12:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 773 invoked by uid 1001); 2 Sep 2001 01:12:56 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Andrew Boothman To: Deryck Madarang Subject: Re: help pls! Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2001 02:12:56 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: <20010901235325.61033.qmail@web20409.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010901235325.61033.qmail@web20409.mail.yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <01090202125600.00411@spatula.home> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sunday 02 September 2001 12:53 am, Deryck Madarang wrote: > Am I screwed? Or is there a way to log back in and > rebuild what was lost. I don't think you are totally "screwed", but if your box is refusing to start normally then you can always boot into single user mode by pressing a key during the 10 second wait before the kernel starts, and typing "boot -s" without the quotes. That should get you into a working system, without any services running. You can then type "mount -a" without the quotes to get the system to remount its filesystems. Now, if you are missing your /etc/spwd.db file, it can be recreated from your /etc/master.passwd easily. You should use the "vipw" command to check that your account details are correct, and if you make any changes vipw will automatically make and install a new /etc/spwd.db. If you don't make any changes you can use "pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd" to reinstall the files yourself. One note, if you've never used vipw before, you should know that you are using an editor called vi, and all Unix users should know how to use vi! Move the cursor to the place you want to add or remove text and press 'a' to alter text by typing, or 'x' to remove characters. You can move back to 'command mode' by pressing escape. When in command mode you can use 'a' and 'x' as explained above, or you can use ":q!" to quit without saving or ":wq" to quit with saving. Hope that helped! P.S. Please try to use more informative subject lines in your messages to this mailing list in future. "Help pls!" does nothing to tell the people here what your question is about. See http://www.lemis.com/questions.html for this and lots of other great pointers about how to use this list. -- Andrew Boothman http://sour.cream.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message