philippe::niquille | regular niche market thoughts

One thing I had to learn the hard way:

Don’t ever reboot a linux system with a corrupted filesystem and a forgotten root password. I had to start the single user mode with the following addition to the grub boot line:
selinux=0 init=/bin/bash (some systems also allow single instead of init)
This mounts your system read only (ro) and let’s you do a manual fsck /dev/hdax to fix the errors. After that you should be able to reboot normally or mount the filesystem writable (rw) to do a passwd to change your root password.

update (24.10.05): If binaries like fsck or find can’t be found in single user mode try to set the PATH variable to the designated location (ex. export PATH=/usr/bin).
Afterwards if neither init 0, nor reboot work correctly (some not found inittab ?!) try CTRL + ALT + DEL, the good old key shortcut..