forgot passwd in SuSE 7.0

[iDavey]

Hi there,

I installed a test system, SuSE,
I changed my password (root) and now forgot! http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/frown.gif
I typed 'linux 1' when LILO came up and it booted asking me for login name? Is there a way I can acccess my sysem or change password. I forgot to make a system disk, so that solution eats dust.

Thanks for any help


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- God created the integer, man made the rest.

[ph34r]

Get a mini-distro on a floppy like HAL91, boot with that, mount your / partition, and edit your /etc/fstab file. Just blank the password field. If you use shadow passwords, be sure to get /etc/shadow* nad do the same thing there as well.

Reboot to your normal system, login without a password, and set a new password.

[iDavey]

Hi, thanks,

Where can you get the distro HAL91 that you mentioned. Thanks and how do you mount your partition, sorry I am new to this.

Thanks

[ph34r]

www.linux.org (http://www.linux.org) has links to all of the mini distros (and full ones too). To mount your dir do something like

root@yourhost># mkdir /myroot
root@yourhost># mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /myroot


Then cd to /myroot/etc and edit the appropriate files. If your entry for root in your passwd file looks like this :

root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash

Then you are using shadow passwords and will need to edit shadow as well.

root:ThisBitOfGarbleIsYourEnryptedPassword:11246:0 :::::

Just take out the garble between the first and second colons : to leave your password as blank.

[Calvin_1976]

The easiest way I have been able to recover a lost root password was linux -s at the lilo prompt. In most distros now I think that has been fixed.

The second method is also easy. Download Tom's Boot Root disk and boot it on the machine. Make a temp mnt point and mount your root file system. Then chroot to that mount point. The version of chroot on Tom's disk will allow you to chroot the file system and run a command. You want to run passwd as root. Works like a charm.

[iDavey]

Hi Ph34,

I went to linux.org and looked at the distros it had links to, I was not sure which one to choose? Any ideas?

Calvin where can I dload a copy of Tom's Boot disk?

Thank you guys.

[speddling]

http://www.toms.net/rb/home.html

[iDavey]

Thanks Speddling