Help! I've lost my root password!

Fear not. This helpful hint from eheintz in the Xandros Forums comes to the rescue:

http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=23661#141821

1. Reboot your system.

When the LILO (pretty, shiny) splash screen comes up showing you your boot options, hit CTRL-I. This will get rid of the shiny screen and drop you at a LILO console.

2. Press TAB to list your boot image choices.

Mine are as follows, yours will be different. Mine is a dual boot of Business + WinXP:

• Xandros_Desktop_OS_3_Business
• Safe_Video_Mode
• !Configure_(Expert)
• Windows_XP

Make sure you have no whitespace after the prompt (blank space), and pick an appropriate boot image (I use the Configure_(Expert) option since it's the shortest and it works).

Add 'init=/bin/bash' to the boot image selected.

This will tell LILO to just start up a shell as 'root' after loading the kernel, instead of starting up the whole operating system and all of the services. You just need a shell so that you can reset the root password. That's all.

Configure_(Expert) init=/bin/bash

This should ultimately drop you at a console prompt, as root, without a password and your / filesystem mounted. In my case it happens almost immediately as I'm on a laptop and the system tries to mount my suspend file located in the swap partition which isn't available yet.

Reset the root password

At the console type:

passwd

enter the new password for root, then confirm it.

Reboot

Then type:

reboot

DONE!

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