[TriLUG] no root PW

[Jeremy P]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Greg Brown wrote:

> Help.  I have just inherited a Red Hat 7.1 system and nobody knows the root 
> password.  I'd like to just scrape the system clean and start over but I 
> can't do that for a variety of reasons.  
> 
> Is it possible to reset the root password without damaging the file system?
> 
> I have a working user account on this system, if that helps.

The working user account won't help really .

The way I've done this in the past is to boot off the Red Hat installation
CD in rescue mode.  Depending on your setup, this may mount the root
partition automatically (at /mnt/sysimage).  If it doesn't do this, you'll
need to mount it yourself.

Once you've done that, edit the password file (/etc/shadow); either change
the encrypted root password to nothing, or change it to an encrypted
password string that you took off another computer.  If you don't know how
to use vi, pico is available on the newer rescue CD images.

Hope this helps,
Jeremy