Resetting forgotten root password

The following procedure may be used to reset a forgotten root password on a Solaris system. You will need physical or remote console access to the system to use these steps.
  1. Press Stop-A on the console or Ctrl-] and send brk from a remote console connection to access the Open Boot PROM (OBP).
  2. Insert a bootable Solaris CD/DVD and boot into single-user mode with boot cdrom -s
    If a JumpStart boot server is located on the system's subnet, and the system was properly configured for JumpStart, you may instead boot over the network into single-user mode with boot net -s
  3. Make a mount point within the /tmp file system by typing mkdir /tmp/mnt
  4. Mount the root partition of your boot disk in /tmp/mnt
    e.g. mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/mnt
  5. Edit /etc/shadow with TERM=vt100 vi /tmp/mnt/etc/shadow
  6. Remove the encrypted part of the root password (the second field; fields are separated by colons), save, and exit.
  7. Unmount the file system with umount /tmp/mnt
  8. Reboot the system and assign a new password at a shell prompt with the passwd command.
If you are unable to run vi above, you can edit /etc/shadow using the ed editor.

# ed /tmp/mnt/etc/shadow
1p
s/:.............:/::/ (Note: there are 13 dots in the second field)
1p
w
q

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Last modified: 2007/06/05