An adaptive output feedback control was proposed to deal with a class of nonholonomic systems in chained form with strong nonlinear disturbances and drift terms. The objective was to design adaptive nonlinear output feedback laws such that the closed-loop systems were globally asymptotically stable, while the estimated parameters remained bounded. The proposed systematic strategy combined input-state-scaling with backstepping technique. The adaptive output feedback controller was designed for a general case of uncertain chained system. Furthermore, one special case was considered. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.