[Gllug] I have forgotten my root password, I am a muppet.

[Christian Smith]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, John Hearns wrote:

>will wrote:
>
>>Hello again.
>>
>>As the subject line implies I have forgotten the root password to an old 486
>>box that I was playing around with at home.  It is a fresh install of
>>mandrake 7.1 and it is just that the usernames/passwords are different to
>>the ones I entered on install (I had had a few beers, that might have
>>something to do with it).  I managed to get in using a user account but this
>>has no priveliges to do anything outside it's home directory.  I have a
>>tomsrtbt disk and have booted up using that, but don't know what the hell to
>>do next.
>>
>I had to do this once (legitimately).
>A colleague of mine called me in to look at an SGI O2 we had bought
>second hand
>from a bankrupt company in the States. Root password unknown.
>He was might impressed when I walked back in half an hour
>with a big cheesy grin and told him the password.

As root, you can just reset the password to a know value. Put the disk
into another machine, chroot to the mounted disk, and run passwd.

passwd as root doesn't ask for the previous password.

Saves time cracking it.

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