password

I have just installed red hat 8 to a 9 gig partition of my hard drive. I have made one big mistake!! I decided to leave the house after typing in my username and password. Well, I do not remember them. Is there a way around this or do I need to start over. and is a username and password a must??
Thanks for all help!
Chris

I believe redhat tells you to write that stuff down...tsk tsk, I am prety sure you will need to reinstall.

Yeah you are pretty much screwed. Better start reinstalling or think hard what it was.

the first time installed redhat, i did the same thing. I decided to make up
a new password for myself and then got distracted on something else.
3 hrs later, I returned and hadn't written down the password. I had to
start over.

Neeldess to say, i'm not using that new password for anything now.

Stick with a good password and use it in a few different logins and you will have no problem remembering it.

A good password to me is enter mixing uppercase, lower case, numbers, and special characters (!@#$%^&*_~`)

ex. H&or49T

but the main thing is use it allot till you have it memorized. Enjoy

The other thing you might try is putting disk 1 in the cdrom and make sure the BIOS is setup to search for cdrom for boot image. then type linux rescue. Then you can at least get in and try and change the root password. Linux rescue usually mounts your file system to /mnt/sysimage
I don't know if it is worth the trouble if it is just a fresh install, might be better off just reinstalling Linux. Enjoy

I just reread your post so your missing a username/password and not the root and root password?

Hi,

Just recently installed redhat 9. Same thing happened to me. I logged in to server in single user mode. Reset my "passwd root" and rebooted.
Worked like a charm. Hope the same applies to V8

This is easy. Boot another copy of Linux, mount the filesystem, and delete the scrambled password for the root account from /etc/passwd

Now, login without a password.

ARGH. No no no.

Boot into single user mode.
(Here's a link to Red Hat's site where they discuss the varied ways to do this.)
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/s1-rescuemode-booting-single.html

When you boot single user mode at the console, you are root -- no password required. That's why you have to be at the console.

Then make new passwords for root, and the user account.
passwd
type old root pw
type new root password 2 times

passwd username
type new pw 2 times
done

Cheers.

Oh! I've been doing it the old fashioned way!