How can a user boot in solaris as root if the password is non functional?

To regain the control of the solaris system as root user can be done by applying the following steps:

- Mount the installation cd into an optical drive and the installation diskette into the floppy drive.

- The system is not to be booted using the floppy and setting the cd-rom as the boot device.

- Now the user needs to type in “b -s” into the command line which would send the user to the root shell.

- Once in the root shell the following commands need to be entered which would create a directory called hdrive inside the /tmp directory. After the directory creation the hard disk partition with this folder needs to be mounted:

mkdir /tmp/hdrive mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/hdrive #SCSI; for ATAPI, omit "t0"

- Now the TERM variable needs to be defined:

TERM=at386 export TERM

- The user now needs to load the /tmp/hdrive/etc/shadow file:

vi /tmp/hdrive/etc/shadow

- Change the first line of the shadow file:

root::6445::::::

- The editor needs to be quit using the ! override command:

:wg!

- Reboot the system. The user would be allowed to login as root without any login password.