Haines Brown wrote:
I have sarge I installed on a new hard disk, and I can log in OK, but
I decided to see if I could log in without a password. I tried two
methods:
1. I booted knoppix and opened a terminal. In it I tried to do:
$ mount -t ext3 /dev/sda /mnt/hd
in order to then run the chroot and the passwd commands, but when I
tried to mount the disk I got the error "only root can do that". Is
the only way out of this to know root's password?
Knoppix makes you an unprivileged user by default. However, you can use
sudo without a password:
$ sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda /mnt/hd
That should get you what you want.
2. In grub, I edited the kernel line for the disk I wanted to boot by
appending to that line the words: "single init=/bin/sh". This
brought me to a sh2.5-2b# prompt, but when I tried to issue the
passwd command from there, I only got the "authentication token
lock busy" error. When I have trouble with lock files I usually
just delete them, but don't know where this one is or if I can
delete it.
Any suggestions?
If you want to reset a user password (or even root), then boot with a
live CD, mount the partition and edit /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow
(depending on which type of passwords were used on the system) and then
remove the password from the file. After you reboot the system, then
you can log in as whatever user without a password.
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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