General :: Get The External Screen Working (only After GDM Is Started?

I have a laptop with SuSE 11.2 installed, worked all like a charm.Then the problems started :I lost my display (it is dark, you can see very very faint the desktop from time to time)Clearly a hardware problem.So, I attached an external screen. Only this shows nothing, cannot get it activated.Since the laptop automatically boots into our LAN, i just started it, and connected via SSH from an other computer.No problem i have a shell.Then I thought to be clever, and activated the pure-ftp demon, so I can download all interesting files to a new computer. I activated it with / as shared directory.After that, I could not boot the laptop anymore, it did not connect to the network.

After a lot of try-outs I finally managed to get the external screen working (only after GDM is started, i can see the workspace, nothing at boot time).Then I found out that the network would not start anymore, actually I could not even start yast or a su shell.After some investigation, I found that pure-ftp had changed the owner of all files in the / partition to ftp (and the group also to ftp)So, su has no access rights anymore to /etc/shadow, and thus cannot verify my root password anymore.Now i'm stuck. I can work as normal user on the old machine, but no network, the DVD wont write anymore and usb sticks don't open anymore.I cannot boot the system in single usermode, since then I have no screen.Has anybody here the brilliant idea I need to get the files out of this machine, without taking the disc out(would not know how to do that anyway).