[vox-tech] Laptop woes

[Richard Harke]

I have an HP Omnibook 6000 with Debian installed. This was installed from
unstable about two years ago so I believe coresponds to sarge. For a long time
I just used it for email and left it on power and running. Then I shut down 
about 3 months ago and now I'm trying to use it again. The problem is
that I can't login. No, I didn't forget my password; it doesn't let me enter
the password. After I type my login name and press enter, there is
a pause and then it shows "Login incorrect" It then repeats the Login 
incorrect 4 more times (with pauses) and then says too many tries and goes 
back to the initial login prompt.

If I boot in "safe" mode (single) I can login as root by just entering
the password and then everything seems to be OK. I did a shutdown and re-boot
and then had a very large number of problems out of fsck, although
the disk was fsck'ed just a few minutes earlier. After doing root in 
maintenance mode and cleaning up the reputed disk problems, a re-boot
led back to the same login problem.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

Richard Harke