Hi,

I got hold of a SUN SPARCstation Voyager today, but I don't have the root password. I made a linux bootdisk and tried to sue that to edit the shadow file, but it comes up saying "magic number" (since it's not a UFS floppy).

I haven't got any recovery disks for it, and no documentation.




Situation from hell, I'm sure - HELP!

I've not heard of a sparcstation voyager before (it must be real old), but here is a procedure that works with all the Suns I've used.

Get the machine to the ok> prompt by doing a stop-a on your keyboard. Then with a Solaris install cd from any version of Solaris in the drive do

ok> boot cdrom -s

This gets you to single user mode. Then mount your root partition so you can see the correct /etc from your root drive instead of the /etc on the cd. It will be something like

mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt

You may have to do a ls on /dev/dsk to see what the correct address for your root partition is.

Then edit the shadow file using

vi /mnt/etc/shadow

to clear out root's password. Then boot normally and it should let you log in as root without a password. Immediately do passwd root after you get it to set your new password and you're good to go.

If you don't have a solaris install CD you could try doing boot -s instead of boot cdrom -s, but I think that will demand the root password to let you in. Booting off the CD lets you in without any password. You may want to check Sun's website and see if they have a way to let you download a boot floppy or CD, but I don't know if they have that.

One final idea is to see if you can make a Linux boot floppy in UFS format. Linux can do UFS if I remember right, even though the default isn't that.

Good luck.

Unfortunately, the Voyager has no CD drive...

And Slackware doesn't have the mkfs.ufs file that would allow it to write a UFS floppy. And despite hours of searching on Google, Altavista, CPAN, SourceForge, Gnu.org and Linux.com, I can't find it.

However, the Linux system on /dev/hdb6 of THIS machine could host the CD drive as an NFS drive, and I could use the Slackware CDs I have to boot that.

If, of course, NFS worked. >.<

Ah well, thanks for the help. And judging by the copyright notice on the Voyager boot screen, it's a '97 machine running SunOS 5.6.

Hmm. Well, as I see it you have 2 options then, neither of which is easy.

First, you could keep trying to find a way to make a ufs boot floppy for linux which the sun machine can read. I wonder, could you check other Linux distributions and see if any claim to support that hardware, and hopefully of any do the would have a way to let you make a boot floppy for it.

Second, if you have a way to get a solaris machine on the same network with this one, you could set it up as a boot server and then boot the voyager over the network. Would it be possible to set up Solaris x86 on a PC on the same subnet with this guy? Setting up a boot server is a little complicated, but you should be able to find the instructions online pretty easily.

If I had a boot floppy for solaris 2.6 I'd copy it for you, but I don't have any, all by boot media are CDs. :-(

I dont think this will work with a Sun system but you could always try. Toms Root Boot Works well for linux machines given the problem you face.

I found a wishlist message on Debian yesterday, but it was only a wishlist message.

I don't believe that no one has a mkfs.ufs file up on their website, or that mkfs has no site for downloading.

Yech. I'd have to wipe Linux (which isn't THAT much of a hardship since it needs a rebuild anyway) and redo the partitions on my PC - unfortunately I don't have enough time to do this. I was hoping to be able to boot from CD over NFS, but until i look into setting NFS up properly I'm left without that option.

So it's back to looking for bootdisks. >.<

BTW google: That boot/root wouldn't be any help, since I can make a boot disk on my own. The problem is the lack of UFS formatting tools that would work with a floppy.