Hello John, hello Walter Thanks for these informations. Tomorrow morning, as soon as possible, I will try what you wrote. No, I did not keep the original files passwd and shadow, I overwrote them by "cp shadow.old shadow" and "cp passwd.old passwd". I should have kept them before. But the files passwd.Yast_saved and shadow.yast_saved are still in the /etc with passwd.old and shadow.old. All is not lost :-) ! If no more possible by this way, I will try with options at boot. I didn't remember any more. Suspens for tomorrow .... Kind regards Pascal ================================================== Pascal, The only part you should have removed was the portion in /etc/shadow that followed root: and between the two colons as this is the hashed password. i.e., original entry root:<hashed passwd>:12345:0:10000:::: edited entry root::12345:0:10000:::: Replace the x in /etc/passwd and restore /etc/shadow and just remove the hash between the first pair of colons in /etc/shadow. This should set root to no password. You did backup /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd first before you made changes right? John ================================================== Hello Pascal On the boot prompt append '1 rw init=/bin/bash' without the quotes. This will start a shell without having to enter a password. There: # passwd # init 6 Cheers Walter