OK so I was given this computer at my gradschool with SuSe installed on it. A person who had this copmuter has left, and I am trying to change the root password so I can access the machine. I have a live CD (Knoppix 3.9) and I tried to mount HD read/write like this:

mount -o rw /mnt/sda1

but I get the message that only root has a permission to do that.
I also tried

mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

with the same result.
What should I do to get around this? Thanks.

That message is telling you that you need to become root before you can mount sda1 (or change the mounting permissions for that partition in fstab so you can mount it as a regular user).

If all you want to do is access the drive while running the knoppix livecd, then you need to find out what the livecd root password is. I haven't run knoppix for a while, but if I remember correctly it used to have a blank password or some such.

I.E. you would type either su or sudo su at the command line to become root and it would emediately pop you in without asking for a password. ...Then you should be able to mount the partition.

of course. thank you. to save my face, i actually did figure it out just few moments b4 your post.

hi,

and why do you need a live CD to change root password just add: init=/bin/sh as argument to your boot command line, and you'll boot your kernel and get a root shell... then remount the partition as read/write and change root password

Oliv'