I have a Sun Solaris 5.1 box with a hard drive that has info on it only accessible by root. The root password is lost, and the CD is also lost.

I have a PC running Windows 2000.

1. Can I make the PC into a dual boot system with Windows 2000 AND Linux? I have all the Linux software I need.

2. Can I take out the hard drive from the Solaris box, mount it on the Windows/Linux box, and clear the root password?

3. After acquiring the root password, then i want to remount the drive on the Solaris system like it was before, with all of the same data. Is this possible?

4. I'm assuming that hte physical hardware that a hard drive in a UNIX/Solaris box uses is exactly the same that a PC uses, and that only the software/OS is different. Is this accurate? In other words, if I wanted to, I could plug in teh Solaris hard drive into a PC, reformat it, and it would work just like a Windows hard drive.

i dont know if you can mount the drive on a windows/linux machine, but a much better way to deal with this would be to boot onto a Solaris CD (available from here) and edit it that way.

you can boot to the CDrom in single user mode, and mount the drive that way

I'd like to try the CD first. But the Solaris OS on the box is version 5.1

According to the SUN website, they will let you download Solaris OS 9.

Will it still boot off a Solaris 9 CD, or does it HAVE to be a Solaris 5.1 CD?

Also, do you not have to enter the root password if you are booting from the CD rom?

hmm... rescuing the system it isn't an option then, unfortunately.
very true...
it will still boot, because booting from CD doesn't access the harddisk at all.
maybe... i'm not sure to be honest. i guess ur knackered if you do... i would give it a go though - if it doesn't work, then you can try and put the disk into another machine.

can you get access to another Sun machine to put it in maybe??

"boot cdrom -s" should get him to a good starting point. From there he should be able to mount the slices on the disk to get to what he needs.

Moving the disk to a W2K or Linux machine probably isn't an option. For starters, an older Spard system probably has LVD/SE SCSI drives. He'll need an appropriate card in the W2K/Linux box to even see the drive. The second hurdle is reading the file systems.

i think a 'boot cdrom -s' would still ask for the root password, although i'm not 100% sure.

It will not ask for a password.