waste of time boot either mandrake or the install cd become root if you aren't already mount the gentoo root partition chroot to the gentoo root partition run passwd logout of the chroot reboot to gentoo,using the passwd you just set.
believe me, I did it an hour ago. Some of you may remember me saying I did a trial install on Friday night. Well i forgot to set a root password on that one and just fixed it as above. On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 17:42, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Sunday 16 May 2004 12:25, howard blomfield wrote: > > in all the confusion with cdrom > > cables falling out/not being able to boot from a floppy etc i think i > > have scrambled both root & user passwords > > This should be quite easy to fix. > > Disconnect ( As in pull the plug out ) from the net and boot the 'puter with a > Linux boot-disk. > Mount the partition which has the /etc filesystem on it. /dev/hda9 > (In Howard's case, iirc) > > Edit the file /etc/shadow to remove the second field for the user who has > forgotton his p/w > > Then as the root user change ( for example ):- > > root:$1$mrOheWcA$35ey/kyasdfasdfdfgac/1:12498:0::::: > > to > > root::12498:0::::: > > Root now no longer has any password. > > Recreate the password:- > > passwd > > You can now change the users' passwords thus: > passwd Joe > > It's safe to put the 'puter on line again now. ( ok, I am paranoid ) > > Use a sequence of numbers and letters which you will remember but will be > meaningless to others. I use old, abandoned, telephone numbers, and bits of > street names dredged up from the past. Don't use a word from the dictionary, > or a name of any kind. > > Your keyboard problem in Mdk can be solved by selecting a US keyboard. > there is also a utility called xmodmap which you can use to alter key to code > mapping. I believe there is a GUI frontend for it, but I forget the name.
