Debian

About a year and half or so ago me and a friend set up Debian on a PS3. For a while I could not boot into the ps3 but managed to get it running again. I was very excited to get back in a play on the Debian distro we installed until I found neither of us could remember the password he put on it.

Normally it would be nothing for me to burn another live distro, mount it, and reset the password. But getting a live distro to run on PS3 was a lot of work. Plus, since PS3 removed the "Install Other OS" option, a lot of documentation has disappeared. Most of the documentation left goes to dead links. Some of them I've managed to trace back with thewaybackmachine. I'm still struggling with the hierarchy of the folders to load on the disk though. I know if certain things aren't in specific places and named folders the PS3 won't see it at all.

Any information on how to boot live correctly or retrieve/reset my passwd will be greatly appreciated.

I figured it out. You have to use petitboot, unmount /dev/ps3da*, remount /dev/ps3da*, maybe add mount points in /etc/fstab, and then change the hash in /etc/shadow. Yea me!

You can recover root password by editing grub entry for kernel and appending init=/bin/bash.

Regards
Peasant.

This is true with GRUB. However, the PS3 requires Petitboot to boot, whether installed or live. I tried "init=/bin/bash" with Petitboot but did not experience the same results. I tried a couple variations of that trick, but perhaps a different syntax would've worked.