Need Help w/ Debian System

[DemonStorm]

OK This is my situation...

A few weeks ago, I visited craigslist and found this woman who was moving and had a bunch of stuff free. So my roommate and I visited and I saw a midtower sitting by itself and I asked if that was part of her giveaway. She said yes and to take it if I wanted it.

She told me her son was very much into tinkering with computers and he was in the military now, and since they were moving he told her to just go ahead and get rid of the machine.

I finally got around to hooking it up today thinking it was a 95 or 98 machine from the 96MB memory it had in it, and it turns out I was dead wrong. This machine has Debian on it, and it's asking for the Debian Login. Here's my quandry.

I don't want to lose anything on the hard drive but I have no way past this login prompt. Is there any Debian compatible password program I can use to find the password he's put on this system? This is legit folks, the machine is mine now, but I have no way to contact the family since they've moved.

Am I just basically screwed and HAVE to format? Please help on this one, I'd love to see what else is on this hard drive.

Thanks in advance and I hope to hear something soon.


Storm

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Here's a HowTo with steps for resetting root and/or user passwords:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...-password.html

[objuan]

DeamonStorm
This will only work if you have possesion of the box . don,t type the quotes
First boot the machine when the grub loader blue screen comes up press "e" to edit
the next screen will come up move the cursur down to high light the Kernel line and press "e" to edit
the next screen will be edit mod, at the end of the sting will be root=/dev/hda1 or sda1 "ro" to "rw" this is setting read only to read write now gave a space and type init=/bin/bash
press the enter key to return to grub and press "b" to boot this will now boot the system into root with out a password.
at the prompt # type passwd "newpassword"
retype "newpassword"
now you have changed the root password don't forget it. while you are at the root prompt # type adduser "username"
it will askyou for a password
it will now create a /home/username directory for you to login to.
now type reboot or shutdown -r now
the system will reboot, when the system comes back up put your username and password in .
the system has to desktops by defualt Gnome and Kde select your desktop and enter. Good Luck and have fun

[DemonStorm]

OK I found out what was going on...

1) The initial "how-to" worked great, I was able to set up a new password so THANK YOU!

2) There's no OS on the da*n thing... I ran the "ls" command and all it has on the drive is bootstrap settings and init settings, no other files AT ALL. So I'm assuming there's no OS meaning I'm going to download an ISO and put an OS on it.

Thanks everyone for the help, it's MUCH appreciated and talk to you soon.



Storm

[oz]

Glad you got it all work out!

Don't hesitate to start a new thread should you run into any other problems.