[tlug] corrupt passwd db

[Sven Simon <sven@example.com>]

I finally got around trying out netbsd, installed and configured 
everything fine and the...
my g/f turn the air-con on, the machine gets a peak and reboots :(

It comes up again, goes thru fsck, finds some errors, fixes 'em and says 
mark fs clean.
But it won't let me log in, so I boot with the -s, get a shell and try 
passwd.

The weird error passwd spits out is "no such user root", so I think the 
db got corrupted
and I try pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd with no success, eighter. I get 
something like
/etc/master.passwd wrong format or line too long...

Unlike under Linux /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd are not readable, 
so I download
the etc.tgz set again to check for any difference, but it seems they're 
not supposed to be
in ascii.

Now, I can't come up with more steps and google revealed no people 
having been thru
the same disaster, so I hope some of you guys can shed some light on how 
to get my
root back :)