RE: One method to recover a lost root password

From Derekj Tourneo on Friday, March 16, 2007 4:46 PM

How I recovered a lost root password in FreeBSD

Luckily I did know one user name and it had no password.
cgadmin

going to the repair mode with CDROM/DVD option off the
install menu, using the "live" CDROM filesystem gave me a
root prompt Fixit#

now mounting the hard drive, in my case /dev/ad0s3a

mount /dev/ad0s3a /mnt
...

now change permissions, but look at them first, make a note
so you can put them back to the correct setting later chmod
777 /mnt/etc chmod 666 /mnt/etc/master.passwd

reboot

remove the CD and reboot the original system.
For some reason my older FreeBSD version 4.3 filesystem did
not like being mounted onto a FreeBSD 6.1 install CD Hence on
reboot it made me do a manual fsck Then another reboot

Now login as a user, cgadmin in my case
get a prompt and run

pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd

You don't need to know another account nor do you need all those other steps. After you edit the /etc/master.passwd file by booting from the fixit CD simply:

pwd_mkdb -d /mnt/etc master.passwd

If pwd_mkdb is not on the fixit CD -- I don't remember if it is -- you can run it from your hard drive something like this, depending on what partition it's on:

/mnt/usr/sbin/pwd_mkdb -d /mnt/etc master.passwd

Then just reboot and log in as root.

David



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