The company I work for had a third party install a Checkpoint Firewall-1 box here. The box was pre-configured and runs CheckPoint's SecurePlatform, a hardened linux distro. We currently manage the box via some nice GUI tools to create rules and view the logs. Well it's time for an upgrade of the system, and to do that I need to login as root, and run the update stuff. Here's where it gets fun. NO ONE KNOWS THE ROOT PASSWORD!!!
Yup. No one. Not the guys who were at this company when the box was installed, and not the company that installed it.

So I rebooted the box to see if I could be lucky and boot in single user mode. SecurePlatform uses GRUB as it's boot loader... and I have to press 'p' to edit any boot parameters. They have pre-defined boot option that is labeled 'maintenance' and it's a single user mode boot option. However, I need the password to boot it. :-/

I have mild linux experience, I can load and configure Gentoo on my laptop, but I'm no expert. Is there any way to bypass this boot password and load this box in single user mode to reset the root password?
I've got all the physical access to this box I want, and it has a CDrom and a floppy drive.

I recall back in my 1st playing with Redhat..5? that you could boot off a floppy OR the HD. There is a 'debug' boot mode that is just your normal
loading blah....[ok] stuff so I'm pretty sure I can grab the /dev/??? info for what to boot. So, would it be possible to load grub onto a floppy, and pop it in the server, and boot it's HD's?

If so, how can I create a grub disk when the only OSes here are WinXP, Win2k, Win NT, and Win 98.... and Novell 3.12.

Thanks!!!!!!!
-Russell


<edit> It looks like the debug mode doesn't display anything like /dev/hda0 when it lists the partitions it's mounting.</edit>

once I was in such a situation , there I tried booting from a cdrom (luckily the cdrom boot was enabled) , then on the installation screen (text mode installation after it asked me about those timezones etc etc) i tried pressing alt+f2 and got another screen where a shell promt was waiting for me .
mounted the hard disk
and removed the password line from grub. (i didnt have vi so i dont rem if i used sed or i used cat grub.conf | grep -v password .

to create a grub boot floppy I think writing the stage1 and stage2 (after concatenating them - copy /b a+b c?? - ) to a floppy using rawwrite should be enough. rawwrite should be available from the web(dosutils?).
the stage1 and stage2 can be obtained from the tar file for grub (search for grub in rpmfind.net)