Booting Into Single User Mode with GRUB

[Adam MacLeod]

Hi.
Thank you for your suggestion.
I'm actually asking on behalf of a friend. He has forgotten his root 
password, so we cannot enter a root password to boot the machine.
I've booted into single user mode without having to enter the root password 
on FC2. My friend has an FC3 box.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Sutherland" <doug at proficio.ca>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: Booting Into Single User Mode with GRUB


> One way to get past grub password is to boot with a bootable
> CD-ROM that loads a linux ramdisk and gives you a console
> prompt. Hopefully you have one with speech capability. Once
> at the console prompt, you can create a mount point, mount
> the root partition, edit the grub.conf to delete the password
> line, also append the keyword single to the end of the kernel
> line in grub.conf, save, exit, and reboot.
>
> If you don't want to include single in the grub.conf, once the
> password line is removed and you have rebooted, at the
> grub menu, if you press e, it allows you to edit the command,
> so you can append the single keyword to make it boot into
> single user mode. When you press e the bootloader menu
> will show the grub conf lines for example:
>
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15.-1-686 root=/dev/hda1 ro
> initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-1.686
> savedefault
> boot
>
> So to boot single user, the procedure would be:
>
> press e to enter edit mode on the grub menu
> press down arrow to position cursor on the kernel line
> append space and single to end of kernel line
> press enter to save that change
> press b to boot
> enter root password
>
> Also, I can't verify if this works at the moment, but I found
> these instructions to get past the grub password:
>
> While booting press e in grub menu
> Go to to the second line and press e again then type 1 at the end
> Press enter to save changes
> Press b to boot
>
> Adam MacLeod wrote:
> How would one boot successfully into single user mode with the
> GRUB boot loader, when it has been configured with a password?
>
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