One method to recover a lost root password

[Garrett Cooper]

David S. Madole wrote:
>> 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

I am confused why this topic came up on this list..
-Garrett