[Novalug] Root password problem

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Tue Dec 29 11:04:34 EST 2009


I was just going to say that I have never gotten the init=/bin/bash 
thing to work, but I just tried it and it worked fine.

I guess they decided to allow 'single' to become root on the theory that 
if you have console access, you have full control anyway.

My 'editor of choice' here would simply be the 'passwd root' command.

Of course, you could simply boot the Rescue System you installed on this 
disk for just this kind of emergency! If you are running an ext[234] 
/boot and LVM partitioning for the rest of the system, just do a second 
install without formatting the /boot partition. It doesn't really matter 
which system you install first. A minimal Rescue System takes less than 
1G and it's space well spent.

JIM

Aaron Porter wrote:

> This advice is somewhat dated. Most modern distributions require a 
> password in single user mode. You can still use the "init=/bin/bash" 
> hack, but a (live|install) CD + chroot/editor of choice/etc will have a 
> better success rate.



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