e...@gmx.us wrote: > On 11/22/24 11:56, The David wrote: > > We have been using the debian 3.2.0-4-686-pae for our company. We are > > moving to another state and we forgot the password. Is there anyway to > > recover this without losing data? Thank you. > > Boot off rescue media, mount the victim's / partition somewhere, then edit > <mount_point>/etc/shadow to change the second field (deliminated by colons) > to the null string. An asterisk means "this user cannot log in", so not > that. Then sync, unmount, and reboot. The first two steps may be implied > in the third, but it won't hurt if they're done explicitly. > > So no, you can't recover it easily (the encryption is one way), but you can > reset it.
If it isn't encrypted: Boot. Pause the boot on the bootloader, and add to the kernel command line: init=/bin/bash Let it continue booting. When it gives you a shell, mount the root partition read/write: mount -o remount,rw / Change the root password: passwd sync reboot You now know the root password, and after logging in as root can change any other user's password. -dsr-
