Upgrade from 7.0 to 8.1, cannot log in

I decided to try to use freebsd-update for the first time yesterday to upgrade a system from 7.0 to 8.1. Things seemed to be going okay until the reboot, but now it is rejecting my ssh key and passwords so I can't log in. Any ideas of what I did wrong and how I can fix it? This has been done remotely so far, but I could drag a monitor and keyboard up to the closet if that would help.
 
After all patches have been downloaded to the local system, they will then be applied. This process may take a while depending on the speed and workload of the machine. Configuration files will then be merged -- this part of the process requires some user intervention as a file may be merged or an editor may appear on screen for a manual merge. The results of every successful merge will be shown to the user as the process continues. A failed or ignored merge will cause the process to abort. Users may wish to make a backup of /etc and manually merge important files, such as master.passwd or group at a later time.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html (24.2.3)

Sounds like you reverted to a stock password file. Did the merge phase succeed or did you inadvertently overwrite your existing password file with a stock one? Check backups (/var/backups or a manual backup of /etc/ which you should have made)
 
Thanks. I finally gave in and brought a monitor and keyboard to the system, and with that it was immediately obvious what the problem was. It turned out to have nothing to do with the upgrade. Prior to the upgrade I was trying to clean up my ports a little and accidentally deleted the bash port, and that was the shell that these accounts used, so I had to fix it in single user mode.
 
Something to try that might help next time: don't set your user account shell to bash. Leave it as csh, but have the .cshrc run bash. You could get fancy and have it check for the requirements before running bash, but even without that it should error and still leave you in csh. (Untested, I run csh anyway...)
 
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