On Monday 29 December 2003 06:18 pm, Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 19:03:28 -0500
Charles Philip Chan <cpchan@sympatico.ca> wrote:
On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 17:33:37 -0600
Richard Atcheson <ratcheson@earthlink.net> wrote:
The question now is How do I get into my machine to change/add the corect password for root?
(1) Boot with a rescue disk if you got out of Linux.
(2) Mount the root partition.
(3) Delete the root password in /<mount_point>/etc/shadow (2nd field) and set the new password with passwd. If you just want to keep your old password, you can just cut and paste the root lines in your backups of /<mount_point>/etc/password and /<mount_point>/etc/shadow into the new files (make sure you delete any existing root lines in the new files first).
You don't need to do step 3. Mount the root partition (say /mnt) Then chroot /mnt Now you can just use the password command to fix it.
I was lucky this time! I had a copy of konqi running as root so I could go into /etc and modify things without using the rescue method. However I'm going to save the suggestions cause it will lilkely rear its ugly head again. I'm still concerned as to how this happened. I used yast like I;m supposed to and went to the security section and only added 4 users. When done I clicked finish and continued doing other non-related things. Had I not had the su version of Konqi running I would have had to use the finger magic way as alll of you have suggested. Yes I rely on GUI cause my brain works better that way. But I thank you all for the help. Your advice on password and shadow told me where to look. Just for grins I just went back and added 4 users as I did before and this time it appended the users to both the passwd and shadow files. In both cases yast created a save file of the files being modified. So why wasnt the first instance appended instead of simply replaced??? We may never know! Thanks to all who responded. What a nice bunch of folks! I hope the new year brings nothing but happiness and great new kernels to all. Richard