Glynn Clements wrote:
>
> Camelia Nastase wrote:
>
> > > > reboot you box and in the LILO prompt , type 'linux single' without the
> > > > quotes, of course
> > > >
> > > > LILO : linux single
> > >
> > > Depending upon the distro, the "single" option may or may not let you
> > > log in without a password. However, using:
> > >
> > > LILO : linux init=/bin/sh
> > >
> > > should always dump you straight into a root shell.
> >
> > even when one has:
> >
> > restricted
> > password=some-password
> >
> > in /etc/lilo.conf ?
>
> No, but then "single" won't work either.
>
> --
> Glynn Clements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
One thing I did when my system got hosed was this:
First I set the cdrom drive to be bootable in the bios, put in the first
cd of the suse 5.3 distro, powered up, booted off cdrom, choose to
install, chose the recover mode.
This booted a mini linux and every was in the ram disk. I create a
directory called /tmp/drive, then did a mount /dev/hda1 /tmp/drive
After that, I had my root drive (where linux is install) mounted, I edit
the /tmp/drive/etc/shadow file and removed roots password. rebooted the
machine , logged in as root with no password, changed the password.
The concept is the same for most distro's. If they don't have a
"resuce" option on the cdrom or floppy disk, you could use any linux
distro that allows you to boot the system and have everything mount from
ram disk. Also there is some mini-linux distro out there, that work
great for this type of thing.
basically the concept is to: boot the system from something other than
the original hard drive, mount the original hard drive with rw
permissions, delete the password entry out of /etc/shadow. boot from
original hard drive and login as root with no password, change
passwd....
Jack
