[afnog] Recover Root Password on FC 11 and Missing GRUB Screen

[Noah Sematimba]

On Jan 5, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Hosea Phiri wrote:

>
>
> All,
>
> I have a client who lost root password for his machine running FC  
> 11. I made an attempt to recover password by trying to boot in  
> single mode. I am familiar with editing the GRUB boot menu and  
> appending "linux single" to make the server boot in single mode.  
> Unfortunately the approach looks impossible on this machine.
>
> The machine boots differently. I noticed one major thing that looked  
> different from other versions of Fedora I have used before. It does  
> not bring up the Grub menu. It does not even show the services  
> startup. It goes straight into login prompt bypassing all other  
> stages which I guess run from background.
>
> Any I dea?

> I haven't used Fedora in a good number of years but you should be  
> able to  boot off a rescue CD, mount the root partition and edit the  
> shadow file directly removing the encrypted password and thus  
> allowing you to boot the main system and login without a password.

> Noah.