If you have access to the machine itself, boot into single user mode and fix your root account that way. If not.... UGH!
First make sure your password is still in shadow. If so you can add the following to the first line of /etc/passwd on many distributions: Code: root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
Most systems you type linux 1 at the boot prompt. What distro are you using? Here's a link for how to get in using lilo or Grub: http://aplawrence.com/Linux/lostlinuxpassword.html
If you booted in knoppix, you must make sure that the harddisk is mounted in read/write mode. You can do this by right clicking on the harddisk icon on the desktop and select the read/write mode. Also make sure that you use a commandline editor to edit /etc/passwd, I've seen that some gnome and kde editiors say access forbidden to some system files to prevent them from being changed.
Have you tried Knoppix? Boot Knoppix, mount your hard disk read/write to /mnt (for example), then run chroot /mnt Then try Code: passwd root Or if that doesn't work, take a look at the useradd command.
It wont let me do that root@Knoppix:/ramdisk/home/knoppix# chroot /mnt chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': No such file or directory By the way im on a raid disk so i have to hda2 and hdb2
