#-----Original Message----- #From: patheve2 [mailto:patheve2@tele2.fr] #Sent: Monday, September 12, 2005 3:11 PM #To: suse-amd64@suse.com #Subject: [suse-amd64] forgotten "root" password - SuSE 9.3 # # #Hello all # #Last Friday, I installed SuSE 9.3 AMD64 on a laptop. I did not #noticed the root password on a paper, thinking that I'll keep it #in memory. But the human memory is not perfect ... and I forgot #this password. #So, don't panic, said I myself, there is a way to solve this problem. #I booted on the DVD and selected "rescue". After login, I mounted #the partition : #mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt #Then, I went to /mnt/etc and edited at first the "passwd" file. I #suppressed the "x" in root:x: ..... #Finally, I edited the "shadow" file and suppressed the coded password #with other datas. As result, there was : #root:::::::: #I rebooted the laptop on its harddisk. But, no way to establish a login #as root. I tried with "root::::" as suggested on the SuSE forum. No #improvement. #Well, I think that there is an other protection level. An idea #of how to #do in such a case ? #Thanks # #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