thank-you its done, i logged in as root in terminal, set my passwd for root and then went to .filetool.lst in XFE (root) opened it in the editor and added
/etc/shadow
Upon attempting to reboot, the system threw up an error message and I went to look in tmp/backups to see the error message and now know not to lead with a / so the .filetool.lst now has
etc/shadow
which seems to work