Gentlemen, last time I forgot my password and couldn't log into my machine here on my far away rural mountaintop, I ended up digging up an old Debian "potato" CDROM and installing it into some free space on my disk, from which I could edit /etc/passwd and zero out the password. These days that would no longer necessarily work, see man mkfs.ext3 -I. > Presuming Linux, you can add "init=/bin/sh" to the kernel command line. This > will give you a shell without asking for a password. From this shell you can > edit your password file. Didn't work. >Initrd scripts might change everything. OK, I then tried linux-doc-2.6.26/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt.gz: rdinit= [KNL] Format: <full_path> Run specified binary instead of /init from the ramdisk, used for early userspace startup. See initrd.
So in grub2 I chose "e" to edit, and changed the lines to linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=UUID=... rdinit=/bin/sh initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686 hit ESC then RET, and alas it was like I didn't type anything at all but just hit RET, booting proceeded as usual, and /proc/cmdline shows that my changes to that command line were thrown away. _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
