Lost root password after attempting profile update

mdl313 · n00b Joined: 11 May 2003 Posts: 63 Location: New York

I recently attempted to update the desktop/plasma profile of my AMD64 installation. For unknown reasons, binutils failed to emerge. Before continuing on, I had to shut down my machine (probably a bad move). After that, KDE fails to install, apparently because dbus does not start up. I get messages such as,
"Unknown username "root" in message bus configuration file. Could not get password database information for UID or current process. User "???" unknown or no memory to allocate password entry. Failed to start message bus: Could not get UID and GID for user name "messagebus"."
This is followed by messages that /usr/bin/dbus-daemon, dbus, and a series of services failed to start. I wind up with a black screen just showing the mouse pointer. I am unable to log in from a terminal as root or user....my passwords are not recognized.
I tried a chroot with a live CD into my root partition. The /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/nsswitch files were present. I backed them up and replaced them with same files from my daily backup, but this had no effect. Also could not change my root password.
Would incomplete update of profile have caused this? Corruption of binutils programs? Would appreciate any suggestions for getting back into root so that I can update system.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 8:04 am Post subject:

I don't think it's binutils that would have caused this kind of failure. It's probably something else.

So I don't understand, after you shutdown and restarted, you were able to login and restart the install, but after KDE fails, now you can't login at all?

The packages dealing with authentication are:

- sys-libs/pam
- sys-apps/shadow

These should not be using dbus, it would be some other authentication mechanism that's using dbus (like consolekit.) If pam completely broke, it may cause problems like this.

Since you're completely locked out, probably have to work from a chroot for now. Are there any etc-update/dispatch-conf configurations that are pending (especially pam)?

Did you compile and start using a new kernel recently?
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Jaglover · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 8:40 am Post subject:

This kind of weirdness can happen when you run out of hard disk space or inodes and end up with filesystem corruption. Just my 2¢.
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Elleni · Veteran Joined: 23 May 2006 Posts: 1270

When I had a similar problem re-emerging shadow fixed it for me. Maybe worth a try.

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:55 pm Post subject:

pam uses the pie flag. Did it re-emerge OK? Try re-emerging pam and openssh in a chroot.

The first time I switched to 17.0 it took forever. The second time, instead of re-emerging everything I did this: