Reset root password without alternate boot?

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Ryan Rix wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Randy Melder <randymelder at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe I didn't catch something, but uh...
> "So, this laptop does NOT have an optical drive NOR will it boot from
> USB."

So there's no way to boot a rescue CD, and appending "single" to the kernel 
command line starts a process that asks for the root password.  Pas de 
probleme, mes amis.  The magic word is "init=/bin/bash" .  Instead of 
starting /sbin/init , the kernel starts bash as UID 0, which is suboptimal 
but will give you enough functionality to do "passwd" and change the password 
to something you can remember, *then* you reboot normally.  NOTE:  You may 
have to do "mount / -n -o remount,rw" so that / will be writeable.  Also, I 
haven't tried this on a system where / is on LVM.  HTH,

-- 
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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see