[ale] Hacking root password...

[hirsch at zapmedia.com]

It's funny, this happened to me last night.  I was trying to install
SuSE 6.4 on a laptop I was given (P166--woo hoo!) and somehow the root
password was not what I _knew_ I had entered.  I did have a log in,
but I couldn't get in as root.

Know how RedHat works, I quickly rebooted into runlevel 1 ("linux 1"
at the LILO prompt).  It took me two seconds to realize that in SuSE,
RL1 is *not* the same as single user mode.  So I rebooted in single
user mode ("linux s" at the LILO prompt).

It turns out that SuSE requires a password, even in single user mode!
I had read all the advice on this mailing list, and most of it made
sense to me at the time, but only because I was a redhat user.  SuSE
is quite different--the distribution does matter, folks.

Ultimately I rebooted with the install floppy and chose rescue mode.
Then I mounted the drive and edited out the root password.
Fortunately, I hadn't encrypted the drive.

--Michael


-----Original Message----- 
From: Carl Forsell [ mailto:cforsell at roman.net
To: ale at ale.org
<mailto:cforsell at roman.net> ] 
Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2000 5:15 PM 
To: ale at ale.org 
Subject: [ale] Hacking root password... 


I have a customer's server that they lost the password, and want me to
hack.  They are running SuSE6.3 with scsi drives as sda1 & sda2. The
box is a Dell PIII.

I booted with the install disk, used the rescue disk and tried the
mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1/mnt" command.  I tried to go to /mnt/etc/ and
edit the passwd file (I have done this 5 or 6 times on other machines
and have never had a problem).  On this box, I can not get to
/mnt/etc!!!  (I have tried just about every imaginable combination of
the "mount" string - with ext2, without ext2, with & without the -t,
...)

I hacked a similar box that had IDE drives as hda1, 2. and 3 and had no 
problem.  Any suggestions? 

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