Arch Linux

don equis

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2010-12-18

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Can't read shadow (IO ERROR)

(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)

Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,175

Re: [SOLVED] Can't read shadow (IO ERROR)

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.

don equis

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2010-12-18

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Can't read shadow (IO ERROR)

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.

Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,175

Re: [SOLVED] Can't read shadow (IO ERROR)

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