I booted up Sun V240 server with boot cdrom -s using the Sun Operating System CD. I now am at the # prompt and su - root . The system will not allow me to set password for root. Get following error:
# passwd
New Password: xxxxxxxx
Re-enter new Password: xxxxxxxx
passwd: Unexpected failure. Password database unchanged.
Permission denied

Can anyone help me please!!!

Are there any more useful error messages in the logfiles?

I've really got myself into a cluster..... . I switched to sys using su - sys. Don't ask me why . But now I can't get back to root without a password. And I don't know the password for sys. So what log files are you asking about? I'll need the specific name. The only thing left to do is a hardboot from the system switch and I don't think that's going to buy me anything. Sinc eI don't know the root or sys password I'm really jammed up here.

If you can edit the shadow file(/a/etc/shadow for solaris, apparently) by hand, you can delete root's password completely, letting you login as root without a password. Back it up of course. See details here.

And if you logged into sys with su, wouldn't you still be logged in as root once you exit from su?

You booted to a cd and are trying to change root's password? You can't just use passwd since it's trying to write to the CD and it's not writeable. If you're trying to modify root's password on the system disk (/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 for example), you'll need to mount slice 0 and edit the shadow file.

Delete the bit of garbage in field 2 and save the file. Then umount /a and reboot the system. Your password will be blank. Log in as root and set the password again.

Carl