No root login after update

hannsmattes · Saturday at 7:13 PM

Hi,

obviously i did something wrong upgrading from 13.5 to 14.3. I thing, I've messed the passwd file, I'm afraid, while the update progress. I can't login to root anymore, the mchine ist just saing "Sorry".

Any help?

regards hanns

elgrande · Saturday at 7:14 PM

Go to single user mode and try to fix it would be an idea.

nxjoseph@ · Saturday at 7:27 PM

Are you trying to su(1)? Maybe try logging in as root directly on the console.

What does $ groups say?

cracauer@ · Saturday at 7:39 PM

What are you doing, exactly? su? Do you have a user shell?

Try `login` typed out in the shell.

MG · Saturday at 8:05 PM

It's a remote machine without display and it doesn't accept root login anymore because the passwd data iis faulty? Kind of a problem if you can't see anything...
It can be fixed with the hard drive in another FreeBSD computer as 2nd disk. Copy the required /etc files to it. It's possible with only the installer live shell.

T-Daemon · Saturday at 8:10 PM

If the file system is ZFS and you used freebsd-update(8), there has been made a snapshot from the old version. At the FreeBSD boot menu go to "8. Boot environments", boot the pre-upgrade version, then try the upgrade again.

Or, try to repair the new system from a backup snapshot: From single-user mode, set the file system read-write, copy /etc/master.passwd :

single-user mode:

Code:

zfs set readonly=off zroot/ROOT/default

cp /.zfs/snapshot/<snap_name>/etc/master.passwd   /etc/

exit

Use the tabulator key to list snapshots and autocomplete: /.zfs/snapshot/FreeBSD-13.5[Tab] (e.g.: /.zfs/snapshot/FreeBSD-13.5-RELEASE-p11-2026-04-11-20:26:19-0), select the most recently created snapshot by date, or one of the other, if the latest is no good.

hannsmattes · Saturday at 8:26 PM

Thanks, elgrande, got into single user mode and now doing al rollback. Starting again. Thanks to anyone.

Regards Hanns

dr_grid · Saturday at 11:23 PM

I did the upgrade from 13.5 to 14.4 last week and for sure one of the updated files was /etc/master.passwd. In the process of upgrading, it merged my old master.passwd with the new one. That's worth checking out.