FreeBSD single user?

Mukarram Syed muksyed at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 29 16:32:44 UTC 2008


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



      


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