Can't Log in

[James Board]

I just installed Fedora 12 on a laptop. I changed the default shell on the root account to /bin/tcsh and changed the runlevel to 3 and then rebooted. Now I can't login into the root account: it returns me immediately to the login prompt and I can't see any error message (the screen is cleared).

Why is this happening?

Can I boot into some sort of safe mode so I can undo my changes to the /etc/inittab and /etc/passwd file?

I tried booting with a Live CD with the intention of mounting the filesystem and making the changes, but the new filesystem is a LVM and it won't let me mount it (or I don't know how to mount a Logical Volume).

What's going on?

[Mordocai]

Well, i'm not sure what's going on, but I do know how to enter a rescue mode.

When the grub boot menu comes up and starts counting down, hit a key and it will stop. Then, select the kernel you are trying to boot from(default one at the top is probably it) and hit 'e'. After this, look for a line that starts with kernel and hit tab(not sure about this one, might still be 'e', it'll say at the bottom of the screen) and add 'single' (without the quotes) to the end of the line. Then press 'b' to boot(or whatever the instructions say).

EDIT: Though, i think it will still follow the rules about the shell, so if that is the problem i think it still won't work.

[James Board]

Thanks. That worked. The problem was that there's no /bin/tcsh. What's the story with that? How can ther ebe no C-shell?

[Mordocai]

Truthfully, i've always just used the default /bin/bash. You might try running yum install tcsh and make sure it is installed though...