[SPARCbook] Sparcbook 3GX problem

[d neal wise]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004, Vasisht Reddy Tadigotla wrote:

> I have a Sparcbook 3GX for which I don't have a root password and it
> doesn't have any other accounts. Is there any way to reset the root
> password from open boot prompt or boot into single user mode ? The screen
> also gets all fuzzy and unreadable at boot up, but becomes normal when CDE
> starts up. I'm not sure what it's due to and if it is repairable.


CDE? Is it CDE or OpenWindows? CDE wasn't available for SunOS 4.1.2 AFAIK
your display problem may be solveable by setting display configuration in
openboot. Of course if you can't see it to do this... once you reset the
root password you may be able to do this using some of the nvram
manipulation utilities in SunOS.

> I don't have an external CD drive and the tadpole media. It's running
> SunOS 4.1.2.

depending on the version of openboot:

boot disk -s

should pass -s as a boot argument and do a single user boot. I *think*
that sunos won't prompt for the root password when singleuser booting.

Otherwise you should boot from cdrom.

boot cdrom -s

Don't have a SunOS 4.1.2 CDROM? A NetBSD or OpenBSD bootable cdrom should
allow you to mount an FFS partition so you can modify /etc/passwd and
remove root's password.