Dear friends

I have a system running on fedora core5. I have installed 2 multi port pci cards with great difficulty after working on it for two months. We have added nearly 6 text terminals to this system. There are nearly 10 users. We have user IDs and passwords for these users.

Now i forgot administrative user ID and password.
Can any one help me how to access administrative rights for creating users or for other administrative works. I can not afford to reload fedora core5 again because I will loose all the applications I added. And also now I forgot how to add multiport pci cards.

Thank you

Thomas

By administrative password, I am guessing you mean the password for the root account. If you can boot the computer from a CD, then you can use a live CD to save yourself.

Boot to the live CD of your choice. If you are unfamiliar with live CDs, KNOPPIX is a good choice. If you use KNOPPIX, mount points will already be created for you. Mount your root partition read-write. I'll assume it is mounted to /mnt/hda1. If not adjust the following command accordingly. Run the following as root:

This will allow you to reset the root password. When you reboot you can login to the root account with it.

As a security matter, you need to realize that if you can do this, then anybody else with physical access to the computer can do it too!

After doing this, can you simply type one in?

Yes. You will be prompted twice to verify you haven't made a mistake. You will not see anything as you type. After you have entered the new password twice it will tell you whether it succeeded. If the two passwords you typed didn't match, just repeat the command and try again.

I'm not sure it's as easy as this...
Since the liveCD boot into its own system, even if you mount the '/' partition, the passwd change won't affect you fedora system. Maybe you need to changeroot into your system? Or by simply removing the proper field of the "/etc/shadow" file?

That will work also. It's a matter of personal preference. And which you believe to be easier. And less error prone. (I've always been rather scared of the ways a newbie might mangle /etc/shadow or /etc/passwd. Heck, why limit it to newbies? I've done my share of "fat fingering"! ) There is also the possibility that a person may forget to assign a new password after booting back into the installed system. That could be very bad!

Probably since that (more than 2 year old!) post I've been told that the chroot method may not always work if there is too much difference between the live CD system and the installed system. But I have never had any problems with chrooting.