Bloody Hell...Compounded problems trying to reset password.

deros3 · 05-30-2012, 08:28 PM

Okay...So for the record, I am a newbie of sorts. I have been using various Linux flavors for years, but I am not an admin. Here is my situation.

My Administrator quit, and changed his password to a random set of keystrokes that he didn't record, because he believed my user had admin rights. But, no. I can't even sudo

I tried booting to the command prompt via the recovery path through the grub menu, but I get a "Enter root password for Maintenance" ...that won't work.

So, I attempted to access through the grub menu by booting to "init=/bin/bash" and Single mode by editing the kernel boot process - but I get a "No-Floppy devices detected"

To overcome this issue, I attempted to "Blacklist" floppy but, you have to be an admin to do so...(BTW, the BIOS doesn't even include floppy)

Yikes! What do I do? I hope that someone out there can help me overcome this. Thanks in advance!

pixellany · 05-30-2012, 09:27 PM

attempting to get into runlevel 1 (single user) by editing the grub menu will not give any different outcome than just doing "init 1". This said, I can't see how a floppy came into the picture----for curiousity, you could show us the exact grub edits----but it won't help get you into the system.

Send me e-mail or a PM, and I'll tell you how to get into the system.

Side question:
Does anyone know where a system is set to require / not require a password for runlevel 1?

anomie · 05-30-2012, 10:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

Does anyone know where a system is set to require / not require a password for runlevel 1?

/etc/inittab -- See the inittab(5) manpages (and search for 'sulogin' in there).

TobiSGD · 05-30-2012, 10:40 PM

Just boot from a live-CD, mount your system partition and chroot into the system. Now you can set a new password for root.
For example, assuming your system partition is /dev/sda1:

Code:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
passwd root
exit
umount /mnt

Then reboot and you should be fine.