On 20 Jun 00, at 11:59, rdermody at lexmark.com wrote:
> While trying su - root I get the following error.
> "User root does not exist".
> Any ideas anybody?
Try just "su -" instead.
If that doesn't work "cat /etc/passwd" and see who uid 0 is.
There is no need for the superuser to actually be called root, but if you
did something like accidentaly change the root username in /etc/passwd
you're a bit screwed.
You can do one of two things in this case:
If you have sudo or similar installed with a user who can sudo and you
only accidentally changed the name of the root user do the following:
sudo -u <username as seen in cat /etc/passwd for uid 0) vi /etc/passwd
then change the entry back to root.
Otherwise dig out a boot disk, reboot, mount your root partition somewhere
and fix /etc/passwd.
If you've got shadow passwords installed (very likely), the root entry
should look something like:
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
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