Admin password reset

[Jason DeVita]

On Fri, 19 May 2006, John Golitsis wrote:
> Sorry folks, I'm sure this question has been asked and answered a million 
> times, so if someone can simply point me in the right direction, it would be 
> much appreciated.
>
> We have a Mac notebook computer that a previous employee used to use and he's 
> refusing to give us the admin password to Yellow Dog.  Is there a way to 
> reset this?  There is info we need on this machine, so we can't simply 
> reformat and re-install.

I think you can boot into single-user mode and set the password.  I forget 
how to do this (thankfully, it's been a long time since I've needed to), 
so you may want to do a little Google confirmation of my advice. 
Probably something like "linux single" at the boot prompt would do it.  If 
not, you could try "linux init=/bin/bash" at the boot prompt, which should 
just run the bash shell.  From there, you can remount the HD as 
read-write with "mount -o remount,rw /", then reset the root password with 
the "passwd" command, and then remount the HD as read-only with "mount -o 
remount,ro /".  (That last step may be superfluous, but it can't hurt). 
Then just reboot the computer and log in as root.

Alternatively, you can download Gentoo's live PPC CD and boot off of that. 
I've used it for trouble shooting before, and it has worked nicely for 
that.

HTH,
Jason