Arch Linux

awshidahak

Member

Registered: 2020-03-21

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] "Login incorrect" before entering password

I had recently upgraded my machine. After the upgrade, my machine started telling me that I couldn't log in because it hwdn't finished booting up, so I followed one of the solutions in this post:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=146376

After I got to the part where you delete /etc/pam.d stuff really started messing up. (Hindsight is 20/20, I should've renamed the directory, but I done goofed it up now). I did re-install pam and pamabase, which re-created the directory, but now when I attempt to log in it doesn't bother with giving me the password prompt, it just tells me "Login incorrect" five times and goes back to the login prompt.

Not actually knowing what I'm doing (as if that isn't clear already), I tried booting into the live environment, mounting my install partition, and attempting to use passwd to just re-make the passwords. Now I get

"Authentication token manipulation error"
"password unchanged"

Is there any way to un-mess-up the login settings on my computer?

Last edited by awshidahak (2020-03-22 00:00:28)

ghepardo

Member

From: Devon, UK

Registered: 2020-03-20

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] "Login incorrect" before entering password

Hi awshidahak, for what it's worth, my take as a fellow noob:

* "I had recently upgraded my machine" makes it sound as though you hadn't run 'pacman -Syu' for quite a while.  I believe the Arch approach is to upgrade frequently, if only to reduce the workload each time of assessing the impact of the changes before they are applied and assessing the results after they have been applied. 

* It may be too late now, but did the upgrade report that any new PAM (or other) files had been installed as '.pacnew' versions?  It could be that you needed to merge the changes in such files into the versions you already had, if you had previously customised the latter. 

* The previous post you refer to is over 7 years old, it referenced a different machine architecture, and the action was reported not to have fixed the problem beyond a two-week period.  Before following this kind of post again, I'd strongly recommend you get a sanity check of your proposed action from an expert (not me!). 

* Finally, a constructive suggestion: when you booted into the live environment, did you chroot to your installed environment?  You don't mention that you did.  If you didn't, what you tried could not have worked.

awshidahak

Member

Registered: 2020-03-21

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] "Login incorrect" before entering password

Thank you to Namarrgon for all the help on IRC.

@ghepardo: yes, it's been a stupidly long while. the computer was out of commission for a while. i don't know anything about pacnew files.

also, yes, I chrooted. I apparently forgot to mention that.

For anyone else who did the same stupids I did and have run across this post:

After using the live environment and chrooting in to the computer:

pacman -Qo /etc/pam.d

reinstall all the owners listed.

After that, it worked.