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(My apologies for my poor English)
Yesterday my pc just freezed and I had to reset it. Once it reached the login screen, gdm said that there was an error reading /etc/shadow or something similar (ironically, it was asking my password!). A similar error was shown in tty1. I reboot once again and this time just when init started to run a message saying "something-related-to-bad-blocks insert root password or press ctrl-D to reboot" appeared. If I put root password it shows an IO error (don't remember what it says).
I reboot once again, but this time I put init=/bin/bash at the end of the kernel line in grub. Now the problem was radically different: it doesn't recognize my keyboard (and it is the only one I have).
So there are only three possibilities I can think of.
1. Burn a Live CD (knoppics, system rescue, ubuntu?) and try to do something from there. And only if possible I would like to avoid this one.
2. Somehow make Arch load my keyboard's driver from grub. (like init="load_driver && /bin/bash")
3. Preventing Arch from asking my password from grub.
Is there any way of doing 2 or 3? Do you have any other idea?
Thank you
Last edited by don equis (2011-07-24 17:56:53)
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You can simply use the Archlinux installer CD as a live environment. This would be your best option as I/O errors are generally a sign of hardware errors. Therefore I would recommend booting into a live-cd, and start with smartmontools to verify that your hard-disk is still functioning properly. After that has completed, scan you filesystem and hope that errors can be fixed.
I would not recommend attempting to fix this from you current install as the corruption could have caused problems that will only become worse as you continue using your system.
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Hello
I could solve the problem, but didn't discovered what caused it.
I run and Ubuntu and the SMART tools and badblocks said the disk was fine. Then I run fsck and it said the file /etc/shadow was flagged (or something like that) and that it had a few errors. It suggested a few changes and I applied them. After that I couldn't read /etc/shadow, but I could move it, and so I copied /etc/shadow- to /etc/shadow and everything works fine now (before that I couldn't even move it).
When I do an ls -l the old file appears and orange and it says:
pr-S------ 1 8923 26304 0 Dec 24 2004 shadow
And when I do a cat it just does nothing at all and I have to kill cat.
But everything works fine.
Thank you.
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The 'p' at the beginning indicates that your shadow file is now a Named pipe, which is pretty useless. I would remove it and call it solved
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