Booting Into Single User Mode with GRUB

[Doug Sutherland]

One more suggestion if the other methods are not viable.
Remove hard drive from machine with unknown password.
Add it as second drive on machine with speech working.
If IDE drive it may need to be jumpered to be a slave.
Then you can boot your normal system and do those same
changes to the root file system of the other systems drive
while having speech tools working (edit the /etc/shadow).

  -- Doug