PANIC: Can no longer log in as normal user!

[wonderpop]

Hi,

I've messed it up, I'm afraid. I accidentally unmounted everything as su, "umount -a". I then rebooted.

Now I cannot log in as my normal user (not in GNOME, KDE, or evel failsafe terminal), despite several reboots. (I can log in as root however). When I try to log in as my normal user I sometimes get messages like "Gnome session manager (process 9077) crashed due to fatal error (interrupted SIGABRT)", but most of the time I just get nowhere.

There seems to be something the matter with r/w status of /dev/null. The users' home folders are intact, and all programs seem to work fine when I run as root.

All this is beyond me. I would be exceedingly happy if you could give me some advice on how to get back on track again.

Many, many thanks,

WP

[Sleipnir]

Are you able to login as user to a console?
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A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.

[alphonce]

put in a LiveCD in your drive and boot up, chroot the gentoo partition and fix your errors.
i don't know your errors but if you try searching the forums and follow the gentoo manual i think you'll fix it.
you could try adding another user account or alter the existing one.

hope it helped, a bit.
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no computer at the moment!

[wonderpop]

[quote="Sleipnir"]Are you able to login as user to a console?[/quote]

I am able to ssh to my user account from a different machine. But I am unable to log in using the failsafe terminal. Is this what you meant?

/ WP

[Sleipnir]

Maybe your init shell scripts are corrupted. Do the following:

* Boot your machine and switch to a text console (Ctrl+Alt+F1).
* Try to login as a user.
* If it fails, send the error message.
* If there is no error message, login as root and search /var/log/messages for an error message and post it.
* If there is no error message login as root and try su <user> --norc this will skip the shell init files for bash.

Good luck!
_________________
A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.