A few days ago I installed slackware 8.0. I use grub to boot it and I didn''t install that till today. So I used grub to boot up slackware and everything was ok. I then tried to login as root but I couldn''t remember the password. I have an RH admin survival cd so I can boot up a minimal system and mount my slackware drive. I did this went to the /etc/passwd file and there was a line that begined with root:x: I assumed x meant the password was located in a shadow file so I set it to * cause I though this meant no password so I had this root:*: However when I booted up slackware I tried to login as root with a blank password it didn''t work. Can anyone please tell me what else I have to do to remove the root password?

You could try to run a brute-force cracker (like John the Ripper) on your /etc/shadow file.

I''m pretty sure that * is the marker for a disabled account. You should be able to change the root password with your CD (or just use lilo or whatever to boot into single-user mode). At that point you have total control of the system anyway, and you can hash your desired password, and manually put it into the passwd file.

All I had to do was not put anything in the password field so I had this

root::

This took off the password and I logged in as root and set a new one. Thanks anyway guys

Boot linux into single user mode and you won''t be asked for a password at all. I don''t know if Grub has anything like Lilo does for passing arguments, but typing "linux single" at the LILO: prompt did it for me.