Could someone please help me, I've forgotten my Unix password and need to login. Is there any way of doing it? If so then please reply!

firstly is it your home box or a work box ? If it is a wok box speak to your administrator otherwise you may have to work at it ... let me know...

If you have Linux you can type 'linux 1' (no quotes) at the LILO prompt and get a root prompt. You can then run passwd or edit /etc/passwd. Mind you, I've never tried it myself.... Hope this helps, Delboy:-)

But surely it will ask you to enter the old password as this is usually the default way of linux passwords...

Go to freashmeat.net or linux.tucows.com and pick up a "mini distribution", a distribution fits on a single floppy and boot off of that, mount your / partition and change the root password, since you will be root on the floppy, you shouldn't get any permission problems, although you might have to type 'rdev /dev/hdxx', to set the root to the place where your regular installation is rooted before 'passwd' will work

Hello, You will need to boot up the system in single user mode, check file system / and remount it as read-write, and then set root's password. You can then reboot (and don't do this again!). At the boot: prompt, enter the switch -s and then fsck mount -u / passwd root Obviously, this demonstrates the need for physical security of a system. If your system has been configured to require a root password before it enters single user mode, you will have to reboot with your boot floppies and enter fixit mode -- you should backup the system's password files (.../etc/*passwd* ,.../etc/*pwd*) and then use vipw to clear the root password field (set it properly after a normal reboot). OR This procedure will work for Xenix, and for Unix as well if you are using a very relaxed security level (one which stores encrypted passwords directly in /etc/passwd). Boot the system from your emergency boot diskettes (if you didn't make these and keep them up to date, you should be able to use N1/N2 instead and see the entry on crashing out of these diskettes below). Next, mount /dev/hd0root /mnt ; this will mount your hard drive's root filesystem on /mnt. Edit /mnt/etc/passwd. The first line will be your root line, such as root:encryptedpasswordgoeshere:0:0:God,Everywhere:/:/bin/sh Edit out the encrypted password (don't touch anything else!) so that the line reads something like root::0:0:God,Everywhere:/:/bin/sh Save the file and shut down. Reboot from the hard drive. Your root password has now been removed, and you can reset it normally. Regards, Sherlock. holmes@qsupport.com

hello. i have a similar problem and was hoping someone may have a solution. my problem is that i can't login as ANY user. it seems that either we had a memory lapse on the passwords for 5 separate users or that something was tampered with on our machine. we can still ftp to the machine with the same user and passwords we logged in with before, but every login attempt to the machine yields an incorrect password response. could somebody have possibly reconfigured the machine to look elsewhere for the passwords then where it should be looking during system login? i am fairly new to linux. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks for your time. JohnM