forgot my root password help!

Rhatlinux · 10-03-2004, 04:22 PM

I forgot my root password and I tried rebooting and typing "linux init=/bin/bash" and logged in but when I type in passwd to change my root password, I get the following error message: "Couldn't lock password file: try again."

acid_kewpie · 10-03-2004, 04:34 PM

run "init 1" instead of /bin/bash. if it is still failing, there is probably a stale lock file on it, e.g. /etc/passwd.lock. the last time i got hit by that, the lock file had a different name though... if it's not obvious, check /etc or /var for new files, which might be lockfiles (be careful though!)

Rhatlinux · 10-03-2004, 04:54 PM

I tried init 1 and it wanted a password for root. The /bin/bash logged me in without asking for a password but I can't do anything with the drive because it thinks it's read only and it's doing the password lock thing.

SciYro · 10-03-2004, 05:05 PM

Quote:

The /bin/bash logged me in without asking for a password but I can't do anything with the drive because it thinks it's read only and it's doing the password lock thing.

yea, you told the kernel to execute /bin/bash instead of init... so none of the init scripts have been ran, which just sucks for you

(ok, now heres the fun part, my default linux mounts the root partition as read only!, so remount it like so)

Code:

mount -o remount,rw /

that should give you read/write to the root partition
now im sure you can change the password from here

(isent linux security so easy to break when you can reboot the system

)

Rhatlinux · 10-03-2004, 05:45 PM

Thanks. That works great!