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This morning, I started up to find all sorts of disk errors going on on boot, so I started up the Live CD and fsck'd my Linux partition. This fixed a whole lot of stuff, so I then rebooted.

All's well and the boot goes fine, except instead of my automatic login to desktop, I'm at the default login screen. I can see my normal username, except my password now doesn't work (showing in a split second Authentication Failed or something similar then returning to the user list). Clicking Automatic Login on the menu just flashes nothing and returns to the user list.

Trying to login through tty doesn't work either.

Does anyone know how I could fix this and login as my normal user again?

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  • I think I may have found the problem, seems /etc/shadow was renamed to /etc/shadow- for some reason. Fixing that I could run passwd with chroot from the LiveCD and change my password. I'll see if it helps on reboot. Mar 22, 2011 at 2:24
  • Yep, this solved my problem. Need to look into why /etc/shadow was renamed... Mar 22, 2011 at 2:33

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OP answered:

I think I may have found the problem, seems /etc/shadow was renamed to /etc/shadow- for some reason. Fixing that I could run passwd with chroot from the LiveCD and change my password. I'll see if it helps on reboot.

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Well I'm glad you fixed it but it wasn't renamed. /etc/shadow- is a backup of /etc/shadow.

/etc/shadow is a fairly critical file on any system so it does make sense to keep a copy around. In this case it looks as if it was deleted or irreparably damaged by something. It may have been a malicious attack to try and cripple your system or it may have just been a hiccough in the system.

But you did the right thing. I'd perhaps consider running a virus scan and fsck the disk to check it's all fine.

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  • Another backup of /etc/shadow is put in /var/backup/shadow.bak.
    – Lekensteyn
    May 27, 2011 at 17:29

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