SUNOS 5.4 Root Password

Technoid(a)cheta.net wrote: That's correct. Unlike SunOS, a boot -s to Solaris will still demand the root password. The only way around this mess is, as you surmised, to boot from cdrom, run the installation script long enough to exit to a shell, mount the root disk partition under the /tmp file system (it's the only one writable when booting from CD) and then hammer the /etc/shadow entry for root to specify no password. Well, it must be working if it's booting from the hard disk. I take it the chain between the controller and the hard drive. Is that correct? Beware the fact that some earlier deskside Sparcs had Bad Weirdness with their SCSI cabling, in that the internal controller spoke to internal drives using an external cable... Is this a Sun cdrom drive? Random SCSI cdrom drives are prone to not working unless they have a sun-specific hack to make the ID string they return something identifiable to the boot prom. Differing Suns have differing ways of refering to CDROM drives, and some insist that the CDROM drive show up as ID 6. Have you tried using the prom diagnostics to probe the bus to see who is home? I think I'd sort out the hardware issues. Solaris 5.4 (2.4) is incredibly old, slow, buggy and unsupported. You can get a single machine license for Solaris 8 (nee 5.8 or 2.8, depending on which numbering scheme you chose to use -- it's all the same thing) for the cost of media and shipping; unlimited license is $75 as is the source license. You're better off sorting out the hardware so you can install a version of the OS that actually works, but failing that you could pry the drive out and mount it on an x86 Solaris machine. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97