Boot to Grub and recovery root password

[gp6778]

Hello all,

I am new to Fedora. I know my top probably already been posted somewhere but I just could not find it. Could someone please help me?

I just installed Fedora 11. But my root password does not work (I guess was my fault to type wrong in the first place or some type of short term memory lost). I looked at the root password recovery procedure which involves select single user at GRUB page when booting. But for some reasons, Fedora 11 does not boot into GRUB. I tried Alt+CTRL+F1, F1 or Shift, none of those gives me Grub screen. Could someone please share some light?

Thank you all in advance for your help!

GP

[daverj]

I think you misunderstand. You don't boot into grub. Rather, you use the grub menu when you boot to boot into single user mode. Here is what you do:

1) boot your system and wait for the grub screen to appear (most likely you will have a 10 second countdown)
2) before the 10 seconds expire hit the enter button. That will give you a list of kernel configurations you can boot into
3) use your arrow keys to choose the one you want to boot into. choose the line that has the work kernel in it
4) type 'e' to edit the line.
5) go to the end of the line and type the word single at the end of it.
6) press the enter key and you will be back at the grub menu
7) type 'b' to reboot into single user mode
8) from there you can run the passwd command to change the root password

hope this helps

[gp6778]

Hi David,

Thanks for your reply. The grub screen did not appear. Instead it boots right into the normal login screen. I don't know how to get to the grub screen.

thanks,

GP

[JEO]

I guess since you don't have the root password then you will have to boot from a Fedora install media and enter rescue mode. If you don't have an install media I recommend downloading the net install iso and burning that to a cd as thats the smallest one. That will enable you to edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and make sure that the line that begins with timeout= is not set to 0 seconds. Also a good idea would be to remove rghb and any vga= parameter and comment out the hiddenmenu line by putting a # in front of it. After that when you reboot you should definately be able to see the grub boot menu.

[sidebrnz]

When Fedora's installed, it defaults to a zero second delay before booting, giving you no time to do anything. While you're editing grub.conf, change the timeout value to something more reasonable, like five seconds.

[Min]

Are you trying to root as root from graphical login screen? Root login from GUI login screen is disabled by default. Maybe you are not wrong about the password, but simply because of that. Try login from the user you created when asked during the installation. And then open the terminal, and type

su - c

and then try to enter your password, is it work?