Root password recovery

Question

I have an SGI ALTIX 3000 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3, with two disks, disk #1 i have the root password disk#2 i don't have the root paswword.. how can i recover the root password for the disk#2.. Thank you for the help

Answer 1

You can't "recover" the other password (other than trying brute force-type approaches on the /etc/shadow file). But you can reset it.

If you haven't done that already, before you do anything else, it might be a good time to back up that disk#2.

One way of resetting that root password is to mount the partition that contains / on disk#2 to some temporary directory, then chroot to that and use passwd to reset the password on that partition.

# mkdir /tmp/recover
# mount /dev/name_of_the_device_file_for_the_slash_partition_on_disk_2 /tmp/recover
# chroot /tmp/recover
  # passwd
  <enter new password>
  # exit
# umount /tmp/recover
# rmdir /tmp/recover
# echo done!

Just make real sure you type that password correctly and inside the chroot otherwise you'll be resetting disk#1's root password obviously.