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I have the Mandrake 9 CD here and have booted into rescue mode. But I am now lost! I have mounted my devices I believe and entered the command prompt..
There is a /etc/passwd file but no /etc/shadow or /etc/security
What should I do now?? Typeing passwd does not work it fails to set timeout or something.
HOWEVER, this asks for a root password for maintenance mode during the boot!!!! Else I have to press CTRL-D and this just takes me to the normal boot where I have to login!
well, something is messed up in your system (and it might not be just the password).
in rescue mode, before chrooting, e2fsck your partitions to check for erros. it goes something like this:
e2fsck -pyc /dev/hda6
-pyc - auto-repair (no questions), assume yes if there are any questions, check fo bad blocks.
after e2fscking your system, try to boot in single mode.
/etc/shadow will only be present if you have setup your system to use Shadow passwords, if not, u can just edit /etc/passwd and remove the entries between the first two colons ( from the left side of the root entry. You won't be getting any password prompt for root if you do this.
And when you replace your password, don't choose something easy that some cracker could guess, instead tell us what it is so we can remind you the next time you forget (after all, that is what friends are for...)
Recently I installed Linux, and I believe I didn't forget my password but it instead "forgot" it somehow. Anyway, I went into the rescue mode (boot into regular install with CDROM, press F1 and type rescue) And simply removed the X in my root's /etc/passwd entry. Then when I booted back up I could login without a password, and immediately ran "passwd" to make a new password, which then worked.
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