Erasing System w/o Access to it

mackie · 09-29-2004, 05:51 PM

Hello. I've been given the task of setting up a webserver. But, the box I've been given already has RedHat 8 installed and no one knows any of the passwords to the RedHat accounts. So, I can't login to the system.

I would like to install another distro. How would I go about doing this without being able to login to the currently installed system?

I made up some CDs with the ISOs I want to install, but I can't figure out how to get the machine to boot off the CD.

Thanks.

Bruce Hill · 09-29-2004, 06:13 PM

Welcome to LQ!

Can you boot into the BIOS?

Who is the motherboard manufacturer?

When you boot it, whether from CD or floppy,
cfdisk can erase your old partitions and create
new ones, which will effectively remove RedHat...

mackie · 09-29-2004, 07:16 PM

Thank you for welcoming me to LQ, and for assisting me.

I am not sure if I can get to the BIOS. It's an HP Pavilion.

All I see (once the power button is pressed) is a blue screen with the Hewlett-Packard logo and then it goes to GRUB and then RedHat (the only option in GRUB) boots.

Bruce Hill · 09-29-2004, 07:34 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mackie
Thank you for welcoming me to LQ, and for assisting me.

I am not sure if I can get to the BIOS. It's an HP Pavilion.

All I see (once the power button is pressed) is a blue screen with the Hewlett-Packard logo and then it goes to GRUB and then RedHat (the only option in GRUB) boots.

You can get a lot of information by searching www.google.com
I entered "enter BIOS in HP Pavilion" as my search string, and
the first result is here which says

Quote:

To enter the BIOS on the Hewlett Packard 3120, then hold down the CTRL+ALT+ESC keys as the machine is starting up.

However, I don't know if your HP Pavilion is a 3120 or not...
try that and see if it works. If not, find out the model number of your HP and
add that to my string and see what you get at Google.

And once you're running that Linux system, use www.google.com/linux for
more Linux specific results.

Bruce Hill · 09-29-2004, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by mackie
I made up some CDs with the ISOs I want to install, but I can't figure out how to get the machine to boot off the CD.

Something else I thought of. How did you "make the CD with the ISOs"?
There are some instructions at LinuxISO