I recently bought a WRT54G with the intention of putting OpenWRT on it only to discover upon its arrival that it already has White Russian 0.9 (JFFS2) on it... and I can not log in.  When I enter failsafe mode and telnet in, passwd excepts a password, but it always gives a  "passwd: cannot update password file /etc/passwd" response.  I used 'vi etc/passwd' to see if the file was corrupted. The file reads like this:

root:!:0:0:root:/tmp:/bin/ash
nobody:*:65534:65534:nobody:/var:/bin/false

The only other solution I have been able to find is using constant ping to time the boot_wait and re-imaging.

I am completely new to routers and would like to avoid that if at all possible.

If anyone has any ideas about what I may be doing wrong, things to try, topics to search for, anything at all, I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks,
-Milch