My brother recently passed away and I did not get his passwords. I am not a linux user at present. I have however successfully changed root and user passwords in a couple of his machines by going into Grub or LiLo. This did not
work in a machine using Mandrake 9.0 so I used the first installation cd. I seem to have use of all personal files. I want ot be able to move some pictures and other files. When I try to access hte floppy or cd form an icon called removeable media I get the following. Unable to enter file:mnt/cdrom you do not have access rights to this location. The same for the floppy. How do I regain access to these devices? Any ideas? Thank you.

If you're using the floppy or CD-ROM to boot, you may not have access to these locatiuons (since they're used by the running kernel). The easiest way is probably just mount the root partition on the system somewhere out of the way like /mnt/sysroot (you'll need to create the directory) and then delete the encrypted password for root from /mnt/sysroot/etc/shadow (2nd field. of the entry). When you reboot, the root user will be able to login with no password. You should immediately set a root password, and then you can go ahead and get access to anything you need.