One method to recover a lost root password

[David S. Madole]

> From Derekj Tourneo on Friday, March 16, 2007 4:46 PM
> 
> How I recovered a lost root password in FreeBSD
> 
> Luckily I did know one user name and it had no password.
> cgadmin 
> 
> going to the repair mode with CDROM/DVD option off the 
> install menu, using the "live" CDROM  filesystem gave me a 
> root prompt  Fixit#
> 
> now mounting the hard drive, in my case /dev/ad0s3a
> 
> 	mount /dev/ad0s3a /mnt
> ...
> 
> now change permissions, but look at them first, make a note 
> so you can put them back to the correct setting later chmod  
> 777 /mnt/etc chmod 666 /mnt/etc/master.passwd
> 
> reboot
> 
> remove the CD and reboot the original system.  
> For some reason my older FreeBSD version 4.3 filesystem did 
> not like being mounted onto a FreeBSD 6.1 install CD Hence on 
> reboot it made me do a manual fsck Then another reboot
> 
> Now login as a user, cgadmin in my case
> get a prompt and run
> 
> 	pwd_mkdb /etc/master.passwd

You don't need to know another account nor do you need all those other steps. After you edit the /etc/master.passwd file by booting from the fixit CD simply:

   pwd_mkdb -d /mnt/etc master.passwd

If pwd_mkdb is not on the fixit CD -- I don't remember if it is -- you can run it from your hard drive something like this, depending on what partition it's on:

   /mnt/usr/sbin/pwd_mkdb -d /mnt/etc master.passwd

Then just reboot and log in as root.

David