FreeBSD single user?

[Ryan Coleman]

Mukarram Syed wrote:
> Hi BSD Gurus.
>
> I am in dire need of your help today.
>
> I purchased an iomega NAS device which runs on FreeBSD.  I happened to incorrectly change root password and now I am stuck.  I am not a FreeBSD expert to figure this out.
>
> This device does not have a USB connecter nor a cdrom drive. It only has Keyboard, Video and RS232 connector along with a couple of RJ45's for network access.
> Having said that,  I have tried the following after doing a lot of researching on the internet:
> I could get to to this stage, bootloader stage 2:
>
>   
>>> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
>>>       
>      Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
>      boot:
>
> At the boot: prompt I am trying to get into single user mode by typing 
> boot: /kernel -s
>
> It does go into single user mode, I think and I get the following display:
>
> "Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:"
>
> At this point when I type RETURN or /bin/sh nothing gets echoed to the screen.
> I think if I could get to proceed from this point, I could be saved.
>
> However when I type ? at the boot: prompt, I get to see a number of options:
>
> . .. dev kernel etc cdrom proc dist bin boot mnt modules root sbin tmp user sys .cshrc
> .profile COPYRIGHT model compat u3 lost+found markversion home cgi-bin share1 share2
> share3 share4 ... share 16
>
> I none of above options work at the boot: prompt.  The only things that work are 
> /kernel and /boot/loader.
>
> Any any ideas to get me to type something here at the "single user prompt" 
> would be helpful or any other suggestions you might have...like be able to use the RS232 to
> connect an external CDRom drive or something so I could boot off the cd in rescue mode or any other ideas.
>
> iomega is not giving me any support since this product is out of warranty and they don't support it any more...not even for a price.
>
> Appreciate any of the FreeBSD experts helping me out here.
>
>  Mukarram Syed
> muksyed at yahoo.com
>   
Mukarram,

What does it say in the 2-3 lines above the shell path request? That's 
important information to help you get past it.

Sometimes pressing control-D will skip you past it (after you press enter).

Please advise,
Ryan