IRIX 6.2 Root password recovery

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Posted on December 7, 2005 by unixwiz
IRIX 6.2 Root password recovery

So I decided to boot my SGI Indy tonight (got another one to hopefully use for parts), any ways, I have not had it booted in about 2.5 years. So I forgot what I made the root password on it. So to recover it (aka wipe it out) I did the following:

(Machine was running IRIX 6.2)

Booted the machine and told it I wanted to go to maintenance mode.
Booted off of the Install media (I happened to have 6.5 on hand, which made it interesting)
Then went to the admin section
Told it I wanted to run a shell.

Here is where it got interesting. Since I booted off of the 6.5 media it did not like me running the 6.2 binaries on the harddrive, so I could not use vi to wipe out the password. So I was left with cat and sed on the install media. Easy enough:


cd /root/etc
cat passwd | sed 's/OlDEncRypTedPassword//g' > passwd.new

where the OlDEncRypTedPassword is the root’s passwd. Yes IRIX 6.2 still keeps the passwords in /etc/passwd and not /etc/shadow like 6.5 does
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I don't know what to do. in the last part CP thing

Then I did a cp passwd.new to passwd and rebooted and voila, now I can get in… Going to see what kind of a SGI monster Indy I can make now.