To become superuser, you need the root password. The best way to do this is
to ask the person you traded with to get the system. If he or she doesn't
know it ... well, why not?
If you can't do this for some reason but you do have physical access to the
system, you can get around this by using a rescue disk that will mount its
own root filesystem. You log in as root through it (usually with no password
needed), mount the old filesystem somewhere, edit its /etc/passwd or
/etc/shadow to remove the password, reboot, login as root, and make a new
root password. This requires physical access to the host, of course.
Any ATAPI CD-ROM drive (the kind that attaches to an IDE port) should work
with Linux. Older PCs may need an EIDE BIOS add-in card (like the Promise
EIDE Max II) for the conenction to work, but that's a hardware issue that
applies to all OSs, not a Linux-specific issue.
At 06:44 AM 7/6/99 -0400, Louis Dupree wrote:
>I have lost my 'superuser' status on my RH 5.2. When try for different
>DIR's get a 'permission denied". How do I get this back, and also need to
>find where I can get info to install a CD ROM drive? I traded for this
>486/50 PC with RH 5.2 installed. I'd like to upgrade, and can do nothing
>until I get a CD drive going. It has room for another IDE HD.
>Thank you
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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