Cannot login to root account on FreeBSD 7.0

[mdh]

--- On Fri, 10/31/08, Pramod Dematagoda <pmd.lotr.gandalf at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Pramod Dematagoda <pmd.lotr.gandalf at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Cannot login to root account on FreeBSD 7.0
> To: "Jeremy Chadwick" <koitsu at FreeBSD.org>
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Date: Friday, October 31, 2008, 10:53 AM
> On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 07:09 -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 06:59:04PM +0530, Pramod
> Dematagoda wrote:
> > > But now I've faced a big problem, I can no
> longer seem to login to the
> > > root account where whenever I supply the proper
> credentials to the login
> > > screen, I always get thrown back to the login
> screen. This started
> > > happening after I installed D-bus and HAL through
> the FreeBSD ports
> > > which were built upon Xorg 1.5.1 which I had
> built myself previously, so
> > > I am wondering if something I did may have caused
> the problem.
> > 
> > Reboot the machine and at the FreeBSD beastie/loader
> menu, hit "4" to
> > boot into single-user mode.  Once there, do:
> > 
> > # mount -a
> > # mount -o rw -u /
> > # passwd root
> > 
> > And change the password.  "reboot" and you
> should be good to go.
> > 
> Hey Jeremy, 
> 
> Thanks for looking into the problem, but unfortunately your
> solution did
> not work, I changed the root password to something else,
> however I still
> cannot login to root once I boot FreeBSD normally.
> 
> Regards,
> Pramod Dematagoda

Try going through those steps again (single user mode, the mount commands) and then looking at your system logs in /var/log.  The logs should have failed authentication messages that explain what's going wrong.  

- mdh