Shadow password file

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello all:

I have a machine on which I have lost the root password.  (Doh!)  I was 
looking for a workaround to reinstallation.  I was thinking I could boot it 
with Knoppix and replace the shadow password file.  As a test, I looked at 
the shadow password files on two different machines that happend to be the 
same distro and have the same root password.  The encrypted entries for the 
root password were different!  I can understand this would be a security 
feature, but does anybody know of a wayI could get my workaround scheme to 
work?

Thanks,
Vaughn