On Tuesday 18 Mar 2014 10:28:05 message wrote:
No, the system does not start as root.
After many reboots, am unable to sign-in directly as normal user 'a'. Have to sign in as 'root' (command 'su' not recognised), then change to 'a' using 'su a'. Access to /home directory 'a' (/home/a) is successful.
What do you mean by "command 'su' not recognised"? Is this a message displayed when you try to log in as "a"? Clearly 'su' does work, as you say you can use it after logging in as root.
From your root account, can you do "passwd a" and set a new password for the "a" account to see if that helps?
If that's no good, can you show us the relevant line in /etc/passwd, so we can check it looks OK? (The password isn't stored in there, as has been explained already.) Paul