I tell you the right way todo it. Make it easy as possible, not so difficult like the others in the thread!
Download system rescuecd (which is a nice gentoo system with lots of beautiful tools running out of the box): http://www.sysresccd.org/Download download, burn and boot from the cd. This is a gentoo live cd, with maintenance tools! After you started from the cd, create a directotry, let us say: /mnt/gentooX and mount your partition inside, where the entire tree lives in it. if /dev/sda5 or whatever has the entire tree: mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/gentooX optionally mount the other partitions from your harddisk, if "opt" is in your harddisk an own partition, otherwise look in your harddisk, in this case: /mnt/gentooX/etc/fstab which shows you the partition table! chroot the new environment: mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc if you need networking, otherwise leave this step away. cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash env-update source /etc/profile after you did this, your are on your harddisks environment as root, and you easily can issue this command: passwd root Tamer Am 10.01.2012 19:46, schrieb Tanstaafl: > Ok, I did something really dumb... > > I changed the root passwd for a system I manage last week, but neglected > to write it down, and now what I *thought* I had changed it to isn't > working... I know, I know, really *really* dumb, but that's where I am... > > I know I can boot into Single User mode, remount the root partition > read/write, and edit /etc/shadow (removing the encrypted passwd), then > rest it using passwd, but... > > Some of the accounts in /etc/shadow have a '*' where the encrypted > passwd would be, and some have a '!'... (ie, one is sshd:!:... and > another is halt:*:...) > > Does it matter what I change it to? Should I use a *, !, or nothing at > all (so that there is *nothing* between the two :: that would normally > contain the encrypted passwd)? > > Thanks... >
