[plug] grub

[Bernard Blackham]

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Kevin Shackleton wrote:
> I've apparently messed up the root password on a Mandrake 7.2 system. 
> It has grub as a bootloader.  Any brilliant ideas about how to do what
> in lilo you would 'linux single', ie get to a point that I can reset the
> root password?
> 
> (I found a reference on the internet to 'grub single' but the rest of
> the message is unfortunately in Spanish)

I have grub installed, but seeing I haven't rebooted or used it in a while
*grin* I'm kinda vague on the details. I believe it something along the
lines of you select which kernel with the arrow keys and they press `E' to
edit, and then it shows you the list of grub commands to boot it. Select
the one that says "kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz" or something similar, and press
E again to edit, and then drop "single" on the end. Press enter to confirm
that and then press B to boot into single user mode....

That's all entirely from memory. The other way to do it, IIRC is by
pressing C at the menu. That then drops you into command mode. Type a line
something like "kernel (hdx,y)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 single", where
(hdx,y) is the drive and partition the kernel is on (in my case it's on
/boot which is hda1, becomes hd0,0). Because they start counting from
zero, hda1 is hd0,0 hda3 is hd0,2 hdd5 would be hd3,4 etc. And also
replace /vmlinuz with the path to the kernel _relative_ to the partition
it's in. So if it's just one big / partition say on hda1 then it'd be
(hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz etc.

The price of a more functional GUI boot loader....

HTH,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au