[luau] chmod link screwup kills samba, login

[TB]

As root I did 

chmod -R 704 tbu

Unfortunately, inside the directory tbu there was a
link to /, so it attempted to chmod everything in my
filesystem. Now I cannot log in normally and samba has
stopped working.

Okay, I am not expecting you guys to hand me the
solution, but I really need a clue regarding where to
start doing my homework.  The question I need to
figure out is, which permissions do I need to change
and what do I change them to? How do I go about
investigating this?

Obviously I need to be able to log in. And getting
samba working again is important. Right now I have it
running off of a knoppix CD and I presume I can figure
out how to mount my partitions rw & chmod things. I
just need to figure out what to change and what to
change it to.

Thanks in advance for even the most trivial or obscure
clue.

TB