Change Root Password on Prism

John-Paul Stewart

2006-11-23 00:35:34 UTC

Post by l***@gmail.com
Hi There,
I just aquired a SGI Prism from a bankruptcy liquidator and I am having
a heck of a time changing the root password. (As they have no clue what
it was) I do not have the original software, so I do not want to lose
all of the pre configuration that comes on the machine.
I am quite familiar with chaging it in a standard x86 GRUB environment,
but this is my first Itanium (and SGI) machine, so I am completely lost
in it's elilo boot environment.
After POST it pulls up a screen which gives me the options od "Suse"
"EFI" and "Boot Modification" If I choose Suse then it pulls up the
prompt "ELILOboot:" Can someone tell me how to boot into single user
mode so I can change the password? One forum told me to type "elilo
linux single" but it just hung forever and I never got a # prompt.

Try typing just "linux single" (without the quotation marks) at the
ELILOboot: prompt. That may still ask for a root password if sulogin is
in use. If so, type "linux init=/bin/sh" at the ELILOboot: prompt to
completely bypass the startup process. Once you get into the shell, you
may have to remount the root partition ("mount -o rw,remount /") before
you can change the password (with the usual "passwd" command). Of
course ELILO itself could be configured with a password, in which case
you're probably better off pulling the disk, put it into another system,
and editing the /etc/passwd file manually.