Getting to root when the password has been lost

Ron Haukenfrers ron at cs.athabascau.ca
Sat Sep 8 02:06:37 AEST 1990


SCEF0003%WSUVM1.BITNET at cornellc.cit.cornell.edu (James N. Petersen) writes:

>Recently, we had a graduate student leave, after having changed the
>password for root on our UNIX V/3.2.2 system (AT&T UNIX/386).  Is there
>any way we can get in and reset the password to a known value?

One of the quickest ways is to boot off disk 1 in the distribution disks,
halt the install and get the micro kernel running.  You then can mount
the root file system and modify the passwd file.  This does work as I've had
to perform this little operation myself.  Instructions for booting off the
flop are in the Admin Guide, 6-23, Recovery From Major Hard Disk Damage.


Ron Haukenfrers     	 	{alberta,cbmvax,decwrl}!atha!ron
Educational Computing     	or ron at cs.AthabascaU.CA
Athabasca University  



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