You need that disk, but once you have it you can 'boot -s' and 'sys-unconfigure' Then when you reboot, you are prompted with a setup that walks you through configuring the box for your purposes.

Adrian Graham wrote: You can download the current version of solaris9 or 10 and use it. There is a cdrom version of it, and you only need the first (and maybe the second) cdrom if you are only going to crack the root password. I think maybe one of the current sparc versions of solaris may drop support of the Ultra 2, so solaris 9 might be a better bet. You do have to register an ID of some sort to do a $0 purchase from sun, but you need not give credit card or any more information than a confirming email address to get that far, assuming you don't actually plan to buy anything. I don't care for the paradigm that you have to "buy" free downloads but I guess they can give away their stuff any way they want to that way. boot from the cdrom. when the installer screen finally comes up, you can right click on the background and open a console. In the console that you have opened you are root. you can mount the 0 partition of the boot disk (usually SCSI target 3), and edit /etc/shadow to remove the password. /etc/passwd does not have the encrypted root password. use the "format" command with care if you want to survey the drives available on your system. It will come up and present an enumeration of disks to operate on. it can be used much like fdisk to look at partiton data from the installer. It will be on any solaris boot disk you can find from sunos 4.1 thru all versions of solaris. The boot -s went out with solaris, so it is not of any use to try to do. there is no path to root via single user w/o supplying the root password. Also the "boot from another partition" suggestion won't work unless the system has multiple bootable disks in it. not impossible, but uncommon. Systems are seldom set up with more than one partition bootable, except in strange circumstances. An ultra 2 may have dual cpu's and will have internal scsi disks. A plextor scsi narrow cdrom drive is ideal if you don't have a cdrom built into the Ultra 2. There are other tutorials on the net that give more detail than this, but I wanted to suggest alternatives to some posts, which probably won't work. (not impossible, but are probably hail mary operations). Jim

Julian Wolfe wrote: sys-unconfigure does a buttload of other stuff that the OP might not want. It's best to just stick the CD in, boot -s, and then manually edit /etc/shadow and remove the password crypttext. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

Any later version of Solaris can be used to boot in single user mode and mount the system disk in order to modify the hard disks /etc/passwd file. You can even download the Soalris inamges from the Sun website and burn the image on CD or DVD and boot from it. Regards, Ed

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I almost suggested that - does it work? Reason I didn't is that the UFS driver (which includes Sun) is read-only for a lot of UFS-based filesystems and the docs (at least for 2.6.14.x that I've got here) don't actually say which are ro and which are rw :( Good to hear if it does support writing for Sun though! cheers Jules