How can I reset the root password on my solaris9 machine? The guy who was working on it previously (no longer with the company) installed Solaris8, I just installed Solaris9, the upgrade seemed to go fine, now it is time to log in but I dont seem to have a record of what the previous employee set the root password to. Is there a way I can boot into single user mode and reset the password for root?

As always, thanks for the help.

Joe

Ok, I was able to get into single user mod by bootting from the CD using the following..

<stop> + <a>
ok boot cdrom -s

rebooted the computer from the CD into single user mode. Now I am at the # prompt trying to figure out how to change the root password. I did the standard passwd and tried to change it that way, it says "permission denied". So i navigated to /etc/ and opened the passwd file in what i THINK is a type of vi editor and I tried to remove the root password from there, but it says the file is read only. So I tried to fo a chmod on the file and it says "WARNING cant change passwd". So basically I am stuck agian.

How do I reset the root password now that I am in single user mode booted from the install CD?

Thanks,
Joe

Mount the / slice to /mnt. The /etc that you went into was the /etc on the CD.

When i try to mount / to /mnt, I am not sure which device I am suppose to mount. When I go into /dev/dsk/ I see about 25 different things.

c0t0d0s0
c0t0d0s1
c0t0d0s2
c0t0d0s3
c0t0d0s4
c0t0d0s5
c0t0d0s6
c0t0d0s7
c0t1d0s0
c0t1d0s1
c0t1d0s2
c0t1d0s3
c0t1d0s4
c0t1d0s5
c0t1d0s6
c0t1d0s7
c0t2d0s0
c0t1d0s1
c0t1d0s2
c0t1d0s3
c0t1d0s4
c0t1d0s5
c0t1d0s6
c0t1d0s7

Which one of those am I suppose to mount? I would just try every one, but its becoming a pain, mainly because I dont seem to be able to umount the device after mounting it. Every time I try to umount it says device is busy. Is there a standard here, or does this have to do with the way the HD is partitioned?

Can you log into the system with any account? If so, do a "df -k" to see which slice is mounted to /. On a typical system, it's probably c0t0d0s0 or c0t0d0s1, but it really depends on how the system was setup. Also, what commands are you doing to mount and umount the file system? If the slice mounts, just do a "ls /mnt" to see what got mounted. The file systems should be pretty identiable by what in there.

Ok, I was able to get the root directory mounted... c0t0d0s1 was the winner.

EDIT:

I got the vi editor to perform properly now, so I deleted the x in the passwd file for the root account, so now it read something like

root::0:1:blah blah bla

the X used to follow the root passwd. So now I reboot the server, and try to login using the root account without a password, and of course... it doesnt work.

So now what do I do?

Passwords in Solaris are in /etc/shadow. Put the X back.

Hi, I have exactly the same problem! But if i use df -k i dont see any disk Logical Device name's like c0t0d0s0 mounted to anything. Just /pci@8,700000/scsi@6/disk@6,0:b mounted on /

I have also found the /etc/shadow file and tried to delete the root password but I cant save the changes as I get a read only error. So i tried saving the file with the vi command :!w But still no luck :-(

Has anyone got any ideas?

Thanks

When you boot from CD, you won't see any of the regular disks with "df -k" unless you mount them. What you do see mounted at / is the CD. You need to mount internal root slice. It's typically c0t0d0s0 (or s1 if s0 is swap) so do something like:
mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt

Then go into /mnt/etc and edit the appropriate file. The top level /etc is the one on the CD. If you've got any sort of volume management, then the task is a bit more complex.

I am currently looking at my shadow file and it reads
root:<password?>::123546


what would i edit to be able to reset the password?

Just leave the second field empty, dont change the remaining of the line:

root::...

It works!

Thanks