Lost root Password - OpenServer 6


 
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Operating Systems SCO Lost root Password - OpenServer 6
# 1  
Old 04-21-2009
Lost root Password - OpenServer 6

Hi All,

It seems that someone in my organization had changed the root password
on a SCO Openserver 6 box.

Apparently, there are no emergency boot disks. I think they were never
created because there is no floppy drive on the machine. I've tried to
use the Openserver 6 media installations disks as recovery but after a
certain point, I get an error that states "incorrect disk partioning has
been detected"

I tried downloading boot disks from the Caldera website (per instructions
at aplawrence) and the latest version I could find was 5.05.

At boot time, I can't change the password nor enter single user mode
without the root password.

Is there anything else I can do to reset the root password. I have
access to the machine by 1 user login and I can get to a shell. I can't
edit /etc/passwd or shadow files tho'.

Thanks in advance.
Georgio
# 2  
Old 04-21-2009
The thing you can ALWAYS do is put this drive in as a secondary on another machine (though watch out for geometry issues - see I need to transfer a hard drive to another machine as a ), mount it and edit out the passwords or even chroot to just run "passwd".
# 3  
Old 04-22-2009
As an alternate, how about putting another drive in this machine on ID0 and installing the OS on it. You have the media. Then change the ID on the original drive and install it on the system in such a way as to get to the password file like Tony suggests. Then put it back like it was.
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