After a power failure, I cannot login

[jimbobrae]

We had a power failure today. I discovered the UPS batteries are no longer battery-y, i.e., worn out. What little charge was left in the batteries was exhausted before power returned: hard reboot.

After restarting, I can no longer login. Immediately the phrase “POWER FAILURE” appears, replaced by “Password authentication failed. Please try again”. That repeats itself 3 times before reverting to displaying available accounts. Anything entered in the Password entry box is ignored!

I can boot to a Recovery kernel. I do not know what to do after that.
How do I clear the “POWER FAILURE” status?

[hendersj]

What kind of UPS are you using?

If it’s an APC UPS and your’e using apcupsd, you need to remove the file /etc/nologin - apcupsd creates this file to prevent nonprivileged users from logging in while it’s shutting the system down.

You’ll need to switch to the terminal console (CTRL+ALT+F1) and log in as root in order to remove this file.

[jimbobrae]

@hendersj

you need to remove the file /etc/nologin - apcupsd

Thank you! Yes, that was the solution. I booted to recovery mode, erased the file, and “Voila!”, it is running again.