Anant Shrivastava : Techno Enthusiast

This is one of the problem faced by many person’s

“what if i lost the root password”

FOR DEBIAN

First thing that comes in mind is “use single user mode” but the answer is NO.
coz debian takes the system security to one more level up and by default ask’s for the root password.

so the BIG QUESTION IS HOW TO proceed further

follow these steps

1) on grub-boot prompt.
press “e” to enter edit mode

2) then press downarrow to reach the line that starts with “kernel ”
press “e” again

3) at the end of this line type in “init=/bin/sh” or “/bin/bash”

4) then press enter to make that change and press “b” to boot

in a few seconds you will be on your “#” prompt

5) only one step left
“mount -o remount rw /”

this step is necessary coz in this case root file system is mounted as read only.

6) finally type “passwd” and you get the screen to change the password

and then type in “init 6″ or “reboot”

NOTE FOR TECHNICAL USERS
those who are looking for the technical details, the main work is the init command that we passed as an argument to kernel, it told kernel to specifically run the command specified in parameter instead of working on normal routine.

TRICK = if you have any program you wish to run instead of this then you can do that too using init command only.

FOR REDHAT

use single user mode and change the password.

but that’s a potential pitfall. coz any person can start system in single user mode and get the password changed.