obtaining root access

[Rinendra Shakya]

Hello. I inherited an old hp-ux apollo 700 series machine. Unfortunately, I do not have any of the users' or root login and password. Please post how I can boot into single user mode and change the root password.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Rinendra

[Printaporn_1]

Hi,

follow this

- shutdown and reboot
- when message
waiting for interrupt within 10 second
- press any for interrupt
when get boot admin menu
- enter bo pri isl
when got ISL> enter
- ISL>hpux -is

you will got single user prompt and can change password.

[Wieslaw Krajewski]

Hi,

Just to add that for old series 700 workstations to
inteerupt booting process you should press key
at the very beginning.

Rgds.

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

1. key
2.boot PRI
3.Interact with IPL? Yes
4.IPS>hpux -is

[Rinendra Shakya]

Hi. thanks for the messages. But here's what happens when I press the ESC key during boot up:

selection a system to boot.
to stop selectin process, press and hold the ESCAPE key.

Selection process stopped.

Searching for Potential Boot Devices.
To terminate search, press and hold the ESCAPE key.

Search terminated.

b) Boot from specified device.
s) Search for bootable devices
a) Enter Boot Administration mode
x) Exit and continue boot sequence
?) Help

Select from menu:

Where do I go from here?

Regards,

Rinendra

[Shannon Petry]

Older machines are a bit of a pain...

You need to search for the bootable device first. It will assign a p? to each boot device found.

I.E.

p0 SESCSI.2.0
p1 SESCSI.3.0

Next it will ask you which device to boot from....Select your normal boot disk.

When asked if you want to interact with IPL type "y"
at ISL prompt type
ISL> hpux -is

Then you will be in single user mode.

NOTE that if your using LVM you will have to activate the volume group and mount file systems to access commands like "vi".

To do this type,
# vgchange -a y
# mount -a

# vi /etc/passwd


Hope it helps.
Shannon

[Rinendra Shakya]

Thanks for the extra info. Here's what happened:

I did the search for the bootable devices and it only found one. So I gave it as the selection. It then gave these messages starting with:

Boot path initialized
Attempting to load IPL
Hard booted
ISL Revision A.00.24 October 7, 1991
ISL booting hpux
Secondary loader 9000/700
Revision ........................ and so on

then it gave some more stuff on the console and the login screen came on.

Never during all this process, did it ask me to interact with anything. Pressing the ESC keep during all this sometimes hangs the system at about the point where it says:

hecking the root file system

Did I do anything wrong?

Thanks and Best Regards,

Rinendra