UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all!!!
We just inherited a sun 220r from another department. The Department doesn't exist any more and we have no way of getting the login password or any account information. The 220r has solaris 2.8 on it and the only version that I have on disk is 2.6.

Question 1: Can I use 2.6 on the sun 220r?

Question 2:How do I recover the account info and use the existing OS?

Question 3: Can I recover the password and how do I do it?

I did a search of all the forums and found many previous postings.

Question 4: How do I get into single user mode. The space bar thing doesn't seem to work? Can this problem be corrected in single user mode?

Yes I think you should beable to boot of the 2.6 CD , and then change the root password in /etc/shadow to be blank (after mounting /). Then boot off the hard disk, login as root, and then if you need to change the passwords for other users you can do that as root. By the way, it isn't 2.8, it is just plain 8. Solaris went from 2.6 to 7, then 8. They simply dropped the 2.X after 2.6

Thanks for the info. One more thing , I can't get the darn box to stop booting from disk. I've tried to hit the space bar to interrupt the boot sequence but it still continues on. How do I stop the initial boot sequence and get it to boot from the cdrom.

thanks in advance

Have you tried hitting the Stop and A keys at the same time?

This should send it a halt and leave you at the boot prompt.

Thanks again. I can't open the kernel/unix file. Any suggestions?

After you hit Stop-A you should have a "ok" prompt.
boot the cdrom into single user

ok boot cdrom -s


I don't remember off-hand if it ask for a password but if it does, just hit return and you should be in.

Then you need to mount the boot DISK partition / onto /mnt
(it is probably c0t0d0s0 or c3t0d0s0)

# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt

Then you cd to /mnt/etc, make sure your TERM is correct, vi passwd, and remove the x OR encrypted password from the root account - it will be the second field (colon separated fields)

root:x:0:1:Super-User:/root:/bin/ksh

save the file, cd /, umount /mnt, and fsck /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 (or whatever the disk was). Then Stop-A and do

ok boot -s

This should put you into single user on the disk instead of cdrom.

Set the root password to whatever you want. Then it's Miller time.

Thanks, I will give it a try.