I have ( or had...) RHL 9.0.
I messed up with root permissions accidentally using chmod. After that directories like /bin and /sbin didn't have any rwx permissions enabled. I could not run any commands like ls, chmod a gnome-terminal nothing. When I tried to logout/login I had a failure message. When I attempted to reboot I got a message like
"kernel panic, could not find init, try passing init=option to kernel". It seems really bad. Anybody has any ideas how I can get around this and recover the system.

Help Please! I am desporate.

Boot from your RedHat 9.0 CD1 ...

At the first promt type:

linux rescue

Pick your language and Keyboard type...

There then should be a menu that says it will mount your current system to /mnt/sysimage.

if it found your system, it should be mounted ... so go to the command line and type this command:

ls /mnt/sysimage

if it looks like your root directory ... issue the command:
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/bin
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/opt
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/sbin
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/var
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/boot
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/dev
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/home
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/lib
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/proc
chmod -R 777 /mnt/sysimage/tmp
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/etc
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/mnt
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/root
chmod -R 755 /mnt/sysimage/usr
chmod -R 777 /mnt/sysimage/var/cache
chmod -R 777 /mnt/sysimage/var/tmp
chmod -R 777 /mnt/sysimage/var/log[b]

if it works, then do this:

[b]chroot /mnt/sysimage /bin/bash

Now you should be in your old system ....

I would then try to issue some commands (just for testing) like:

ls -al

ps -ef

fdisk -l

That should hopefully make it so you can exit, reboot, and log in as root...if you changed the permissions of /dev or /proc then you'll probably always have problems until you totally reinstall the system...