hi i would like to know if they is any way of finding out the su root user password. if they is can you please tell me

You mean, you forgot the root password? Or trying to crack into someone's system? I don't think if you didn't clarify your intentions, someone else is gonna answer this query.

You can use mine. It's ********
If that doesn't work, you could boot into runlevel 1 which gets to to root login with no password. From there, you can change it with the command: passwd

If you cannot remember your own root password, let this be a lesson to you. If you are trying to crack someone else's system, this thread will be closed.

i need to find out coz i just started work as a system administrator and need to access the system, and the senior administrator is not around and i need to access the system its an emergency

You will need to contact the senior admin. Presumably he/she left an emergency contact phone number. Good luck with it

You definitely work for a strange company. They hire you as a system administrator, but don't give you the root password. Did they at least give you sudo access? Second, the senior admin is not around, and there is no backup person to deal with the emergency. Just the new guy who doesn't have the root password and doesn't know how to get ahold of the senior admin. And the company expects you to mitigate the emergency by searching out advice as a newbie poster on a Linux forum? A really strange company, that's for sure.

I hope you understand how fishy your story sounds. You cannot expect people to jump right in and start advising you how to go about cracking a system. Not that anyone here would be likely to do that anyway. Even for a legitimate sounding story.

If you are legit, good luck. If you can't get ahold of the senior admin, try their supervisor. And point out to your new company how important backups are - both people and data.

I can definetely smell something fishy, emergency lasting more than 24hrs, i.e. that's the time difference between ur. first and second post, certainly I can't believe that system are without supervision for 24 hrs.????

Snr. admin would have taken care that you have enough privileges to successfully carry out your duties via sudo/ groups etc. Probably if you are trying to tamper an official running system, even with logining in as single user, then your senior admin would have taken care to have password protected init 1.

Plain vanilla answer is simple NO, unless you have loads of super-computer working under your command to crack a non shadowed passwd {which probably is non-existent nowadays}.

can a mod close this post?

no thanks any of you lot.
i finally got the password and couldn't contact senior admin coz his father died and he left with out informing the company and nobody had "HIS CONTACT NUMBER" but his back now.

I'd be surprised if a company doesn't have a contact number for their admin, I still think this is phony and if it's not, then it's seriously sad.

There isn't a simple method to recover passwords (including windows) that I know of besides brute force. AFAIK the only way if one forgets is to change it. Lots of posts on this website to change the root password if it is forgotten.

I think the moderator should close this thread as the person who requested for help finally got his password from the old administrator.

No offense intended, but you must be a very new sysadmin. To strike out at people who held back advice in order to maintain some shred of system security for your missing senior sysadmin is just not right. Most sysadmins would be grateful that a request such as yours was viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

It is usually trivial to reset a root password if you have physical access to the machine. If you don't have access, then it's damn near impossible. Unless whoever setup system security was a nimrod. Every sysadmin I know already knows this. To even ask the question you did in the first place makes many people suspect your motives and your experience.