I lost the root password for a Solaris machine. I have access with one user id, but it doesn't have permissions to change passwd or to perform new users. If someone knows some clue to solve this problem...Thanks a lot...

Hi William Yo hv not mentioned ur platform, whether u r using SUN or intel hardware..? If U r using SUNsparck thn do the following go to OBP prompt ( either by shutdown or by pressing stop+a...but second method risks the loss of data, do sync on ok prompt) now get ur original solaris CD-ROM and boot the machine with following command boot cdrom -s it will directly giv yo # prompt now creat one directory in root by some name mount your root (/) partition on the dirctory just created using mount / /directoryname now edit the /etc/shadow file and remove all the characters between second colon (:) and third colon, save the file....unmount / give init 6 login as root, it wont ask you the password set new password using passwd command. thts it....feel free to mail me in case of problem.

How to recover a lost or forgotten password Solaris. If you have lost or forgotten the root password on your Sun Sparc system here are some instructions for regaining control of the system. You will need a cdrom drive and a Solaris installation cdrom. Just to be safe make sure the installation cdrom is equal to, or later than, the OS release on the hard disk. If the system is not halted then halt the system by pressing Stop-A. This will bring you to the ok prompt. Place the installation cdrom in the cdrom drive. Boot the system to single user mode using the cdrom drive. Type boot cdrom -s It may take a while but you will automatically be logged in as root in single user mode running the OS from the cdrom. If you had to force halt the system, by pressing Stop-A for instance, then the partitions on the hard disk will not be marked as being shutdown cleanly. So I recommend running fsck on the root partition. e.g. fsck -y /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 Now c0t3d0s0 is just the root partition in this example. Please verify your boot disk. Now mount the root partition. The cdrom has created a directory a for mounting hard disks. So type mount /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 /a The next step is to remove root's password. Using your favorite editor, edit /a/etc/shadow. Find root's entry in the file and make the second field null. Colons are the field delimeters. So your entry, after changes, should look something like root::10565:::::: Various fields will be used if certain parameters have been set for the OS. Now boot to single user mode using the hard disk. reboot -- -s NOTE: that is reboot space hyphen hyphen space hyphen s. You can login as root without a password and set root's password using the passwd command. Finally, exit single user mode and let the system continue booting to multi-user mode. I recommend rebooting to single user mode first because if the system is set to not allow null passwords you may not be able to login as root with a null password in multi-user mode.