xeo wrote:Slave the hard drive in another PC and see whats on it?
That is what I would do. Then again, it is an old SCSI. Those aren't the most compatible thing around.
overWeight wrote:You may also be able to boot the server into Single User Mode from the boot loader, then you will have full root access but it will not ask you for the root password. You can then update the root password to whatever. I'm not sure exactly what is required to get single user mode from an SCO box, so you will have to do some searches. Slaving the drive may be just as easy...
Ancient websites say press spacebar at splashscreen. Type
initstate=1
go
as arbitrary as that sounds. Though the process changes significantly from version to version. Others say just hit ctrl+P during boot to get a prompt.
The way of resetting root without single user mode available (unlikely) is along a couple paths. I don't know how technical you are so I'll just give a moderate detail overview. First boot the machine with a livecd.
Mount the drive, probably the first volume of the SCSI
mount /dev/dsk/sda1 /somewherethen edit out the password on the shadowfile
vi /somewhere/etc/shadow
iroot:deletethesecondfield::::::
:wqAnother technique I have heard of but not used is to mount the offending filesystem as your root, then use passwd as normal. Theory goes that passwd does not care that it is theoretically a different system, it is just editing files in the same location on your behalf.
Of course you could remove the password within x or windows too in order to keep the system fully usable. My guess based on the age, the tape drive, and that they kept it around so long is that it has something once important on it like a sales database or something. Possibly proprietary, thus the tenure of the old beast. It might not be able to be accessed properly without actually running the old software.