password failure- after mergmaster

[Jean-Paul Natola]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 01:29:44PM -0700, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> On Jul 9, 2007, at 1:25 PM, Peter Boosten wrote:
> >
> >Having read this I must admit that it's a complete mystery to me why
> >mergemaster would touch your password file at all...
> 
> Because sometimes new versions of the OS come with new built-in user  
> accounts, which need to be added to the existing passwd or groups  
> databases somehow?

Yes, exactly. Have to *merge* the changes into /etc/master.passwd rather
than brute force overwrite.

Notice the difference from my first post in this thread, the file which
was clobbered is /etc/master.passwd, not just /etc/passwd which is a
dummy 


I'M DONE now- now I cant even boot into safe or single user mode

It keeps asking me to enter full pathname of  shell or RETURN  for /bin/sh

I hit enter and I see the same message again , and again , and again and
again