you could use a small live CD (knoppix or otherwise, then chroot to your local drive, and run passwd...
The minimal Gentoo install CD is only a couple hundred meg - not quite as bad as doing a full sized CD... it even just boots to a command prompt, so the boot up is pretty quick. But there are many options for Live CDs, of course. this one is just the smallest I could think of of the top of my head. the commands would be something like: #mount the local root partition (the physical drive/partition) mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/point #mount proc if needed - probably not in this case mount -t none proc /mnt/point/proc #chroot to the mounted drive chroot /mnt/point /bin/bash #change password and reboot passwd exit reboot HTH Shawn On Friday 09 September 2005 23:24, Jarrod Major wrote: > Hey Gang, > > I've been beating my head against a wall here for hours. I have a server > that I haven't yet put into production (it's only been on my local network) > and I haven't touched it for months. When i went to login, it appears that > I have forgotten my root and user passwords. Nothing I enter works anyway. > I usually write these things down, must've slipped my mind this time. > > I have the original install media so I did a Google search and the easiest > way appears to fire in Disc 1 and select Rescue system from the boot menu. > They talk about editing the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files. I have done > this and when I reboot, I still can't get in as root. Effectively, they > suggest you clear out the root password so that when you reboot, there is > no password, you are supposed to just hit enter. When I hit enter at the > root login prompt I get "Login incorrect". > > I tried Tom's Root Boot disc but unfortunately it doesn't support the > Reiser FS and my / partition (where /etc lives, no d'uh!) is Reiser. > > I have a Knoppix disc but I didn't make it and for whatever reason this > particular system doesn't want to boot from this CD (the SuSE 9.2 disc one > is also burned and boots fine). I didn't want to do a big ISO download for > the latest Knoppix, this one isn't that old... 3.4 > > So I am running out of options here. There was other advice to physically > remove the drive and install it in a working system and once mounted edit > the same files. I don't want to resort to this and it almost seems like > they are getting reset somehow. Is Reiser doing this? Is this a funky SuSE > thing? I read docs right off the SuSE site regarding the rescue procedure > so I am confident they are supposed to be right. > > This is a basic install, no GUI, just the OS and Apache and a few other > things. > > I'm not having much luck with root passwords these days. First my laptop > and now this (I haven't tried my user password for root in Kubuntu Neil, I > will). > > Going to bed, gonna try this again tomorrow. TIA! _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
