Quoting Counter Fraud-Group (Malcolm Gardner) from Feb 26 > I don't if any one can help me. My late son has gentoo on both his > laptop and pc. I do not know any of the passwords but I need to be able > to log on to they system to access critical information relating to our > business. Can anyone advise me how I may be able to get into the system? > > I am getting pretty desperate
DISCLAIMER 1: Before you read on, I would like to express that I pass that information for a purely informational purpose, and cannot be held responsible for its application for illegal breach of security, unauthorized access to, or loss of, any sensitive data, or even distruction of the computer systems in question. Use it at your own discretion. END DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER 2: If you are not familiar with Linux or UNIX systems, get someone who is to do it for/with you. This is not trivial, and it is _very_ easy to destroy data, or simply get very frustrated trying this. END DISCLAIMER That said, probably the easiest way to do this would be to try booting into "single user mode" by issuing the kernel command linue option "single" from the boot loader. If you turn on the computer, wait until the GRUP boot screen appears and press "e" to edit the command line, and add the word "single" (without quotes) to the command line which appears. It is possible that even single user mode is protected by a root password, or might even be disabled from within GRUB. If so, you have to try one of the solutions below: Second way: boot from any of the linux live-cds, mount the harddisks from there and transfer your data to another media, like burning to a CD, storing on a pen-drive or ftp/scp-ing to another machine. You can get linux livecds from these locations: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ http://trinux.sourceforge.net/ http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/1.4_rc2/x86/x86/livecd/ It is also possible to do the same using one or more floppies (usually called "rescue floppies", available from several distributions), but livecds usually provide full-fledged and easier to use linux systems. It is not easy determining which steps will be necessary for your problem, but basically the roadmap looks like this: 1)Download the images, burn them onto a cd, and boot them in one of the machines. 2) using fdisk or cfdisk, determine what partitions are on the linux system to recover. 3) create the appropriate mount points in /mnt 4) you might have to create device files in /dev too, read man mknod and /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt on how to do this 5) mount the partitions 6) browse for your files Another prssibility would be to physically remove the harddisks from the machine (probably not possible with the laptop), put them into another computer, and browse the files from there. You can even do this from Windows using the utility from here: http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm A fifth way i can imagine (not sure if that would work though) would be to, from the livecd system, chroot to the properly mounted system partitions (read the gentoo install guide on how to do this exactly), and in the chrooted system, using the passwd utility to set the root password to a new one. If your son on the was on the safe/paranoid side, he might have his data encrypted, in which case you might be pretty out of luck, as state-of-the-art encryption is very effective and almost impossible to brute-force. Hope it helps, Peter -- "The Empire never ended." Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura, no. 6 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
