On 30 Jan 2012, at 23:39, Yasha Karant wrote:
> Upon boot, automatic fsck failed, and a request was posted for root password.  However, no more than one character of the password would be accepted, causing an endless loop to this condition and not allowing me control of the system (run fsck manually).

For the next time (because there's always one ;-) ), you can use
init=/bin/bash
as a boot option, it will completely skip the standard init and therefore the root password request.

It's anyway interesting that you could not login as root. What do you have in nsswitch and pam.d/system-auth ?

Cheers,
  Sergio

-- 
 Sergio Ballestrero  - http://physics.uj.ac.za/psiwiki/Ballestrero
 University of Johannesburg, Physics Department
 ATLAS TDAQ sysadmin group