7 Comments on “Solaris X86 – Instruction to boot Single user mode for maintenance”

• Abishek

  29 April, 2013, 5:47

  Hi Ram,

  Need your help please.

  I am having solaris x86 os in Sunfire X4150 hardware, Total two disks are there and it has been configured with root mirroring.

  I am not able to type the password in password filed, if i put the mouse pointer inside the password field i am not able to see the pointer and not able to type the password. but in username field i am able to type “root”.Any what it the issue, i never faced this issue.

  Please let me know in this situation how to break the root password in Solaris 10 x86 OS. or is there any way to fix this issue .

  Thanks
  Abishek
• Ramdev

  29 April, 2013, 5:55

  option 1 : Connect to machine remotely using ssh , and try to login as root
  option 2 : just ssh to the host remotely using any other users account and try su –
  Option 3 : try to use failsafe option to loging to the machine and see the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow are in good shape on root filesystem.

  If any of the above thing works, the issues is with your xdeskop not with the root password.
• Abishek

  1 May, 2013, 9:21

  Thanks Ramdev
  I bought the server up but facing issues here

  . i am new in Solaris platform. I am having same issue in two server ( X86 and Sparc ).while reseting the users password using root account.

  X86–> Permission denied
  Sparc –> Segmentation fault error.

  I have reseted the root password,( x86 ) but now when i am trying to reset the user password using root i am getting “permission denied”.this issue i am facing in solaris x86.For sparc i am getting “Segmentation fault error” while resetting the user password.

  First iI will give the details of solaris x86.

  I have created new password file and shadow and pasted the content from passwd.org & shadow.org,i felt might be passwd file and shadow file gotcorrupted.

  -r–r–r– 1 root sys 5011 May 1 04:15 passwd
  -r–r–r– 1 root sys 5011 Apr 30 06:33 passwd.01may2013
  -r–r–r– 1 root sys 5011 Dec 18 12:08 passwd.old
  -r–r–r– 1 root sys 5011 Dec 18 12:08 passwd.org
  root@sfureatldp001 > ls -al shadow*
  -r——– 1 root sys 2880 May 1 04:21 shadow
  -r——– 1 root sys 2880 May 1 04:10 shadow.01may2013

  For SParc server — > Recently server went down and stuck with FSCK error, I ran fsck & server came up. Also i break the root password since we lost the root password for this server. I booted server in multiuser mode successfully.when i tried to reset the root password and user password i am getting “segmentation error”.

  Can you please help me to fix this issue.
• Abishek

  1 May, 2013, 9:24

  #passwd user

  Reenter new password :

  Segmentation Fault
• Ramdev

  2 May, 2013, 9:04

  Hi Abishek,

  default permissions for /etc/passwd  are 644. And that might be causing permission denies for x86.

  about segmentation error, i suspect file corrpution. just create a new /etc/password with one single root entry and then run pwconv to create the /etc/shadow. And then change the root password to check if all working well.

  if that works just copy the user information from old files to new files and see if they are working.
• Abishek

  8 May, 2013, 14:04

  Sorry Ram for the late response.Thank you very much for the reply.
  I fixed solaris x86 issue, it was my mistake which i didnt notice.But sparc still i haven’t get the console access still waiting for the same.

  Resolution for Solaris x86 :
  When i checked the /etc/shadow file it got corrupted.I restored it from backup ( /etc/shadow.org ) this shadow.org file was very old backup file after that lots of updates have been made in the /etc/shadow file.

  So few users id was in the /etc/password file but in /etc/shadow ( after restoring it from old backup ) it was missing, I just ran pwconv commnad and /etc/shadow file got update from the /etc/passwd file & my issue got fixed.
• Ramdev

  9 May, 2013, 4:19

  Thanks Abishek, for the update.