Mini HOWTO: Recovering from a forgotten GRUB bootloader password

[mhelios]

Here's how to recover from a forgotten GRUB bootloader password:

Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and comment out (#) or delete the password entry. Then, GRUB will no longer require a password to edit the boot lines.

If you want to assign a new password perform these steps:

**enter `grub` as root.

**Run md5crypt:

grub>md5crypt

**Enter a new password.
The password will then be output to the terminal in MD5 format.
Then you can cut and paste (or highlight and middle-click) this encrypted password into your password statement.

[mhelios]

UPDATE - 24/02/04

To be more specific, when you create the MD5 password hash with md5crypt and want to set it in the grub.conf, the correct format is:

password --md5 md5_hash