SCO

Hi.

I dont have the root password to a really old openserver 5.0.5 machine, where i need to recover some root-owned file. I searched google for methods to recover the root password, and these methods involve having the 'boot' and 'root' floppy images available.

I checked ftp.caldera.com for these two floppy images. The believe i got the boot file correctly:

oss604a.boot - for openserver 5.0.5

But i can't figure out which one is the root floppy image.

ftp site is ftp://ftp.caldera.com/pub/openserver5

Any form of help / advice is highly appreciated.

Thank you,
Marc

The boot and filesystem floppies can only be made on the machine that you wish to boot. The boot diskette has to know which disk controller you are using and the way that the hard disk is partitioned.
The disk that you can download is only the installation disk, there is no way to get a shell from it.
Build another machine with a disk controller card that is compatible with the disk drive that you want to get the files from, and then add the old disk as a second drive in the new machine.
When you add the second drive be very careful not to change any partition sizes of accidently format the drive.
If the data is mission crititcal, use Symantec Ghost to duplicate the drive first.
The new machine can have any version of SCO on it.
Another method which might work is to look in the startup scripts (files in /etc/rc2.d, or /etc/rc.d for files that have been installed there with incorrect permissions that you can write to. Then add code to one of these to either replace /etc/shadow with one where you know the root password, or just change the permissions on the files you need. Then reboot.