Root Privileges not working

[alexsadler]

basically I screwed up I thought in my stupid head that if I selected everything on the hard disk that I would have privileges to do everything but it turns it that all it doe is throw this error:
sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0666, should be 0440
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting

when I try to run something as root and anything run graphically just crashes also what is most annoying is the act that can't change it back. Please help as I can't install anything new or do anything with root.

[hazel]

First of all, never ever try to give yourself total priveleges. Even if this had worked, it would be a seriously bad idea. The whole point of the Linux permissions system is that you don't give yourself root access to anything unless you need to be root to do a particular job. Everything else you do as yourself. That way you miss out on 95% of opportunities to screw up your system. In Windows you're always root and that's why all that malware you pick up can do its dirty work.

Your problem is that you are now trapped in a loop. You can't use sudo because your sudoers file is bad and you can't fix it without using sudo! On another distro, you could just log in as root but you can't do that in Ubuntu. Fortunately you can use the live Ubuntu on your installation disk to break in. You need to boot from it and then mount your normal root partition on /mnt. After that, you can go there and reset the sudoers file permissions. This should do it I think:

mount /dev/sda1 (or whatever your root partition is called) /mnt
cd /mnt/etc
chmod 0440 sudoers
shutdown -r now

remove the cd and let the system reboot from the hard drive.

[alexsadler]

Thank you! I must of been having a "windows" moment (I only switched about a month ago)

[alexsadler]

oh dear It didn't work tried something else and now Ubuntu doesn't even load I think I'm gonna have to reinstall Ubuntu curse me for being stupid