NCR Tower help : recovering root password

From: Patrick Finnegan <pat_at_purdueriots.com>
Date: Wed Sep 18 19:08:00 2002

On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> Now for the problem: I have no idea what any of the passwords are on the
> machine. Searching comp.os.unisys and comp.os.ncr bring no useful
> results. The only non-pasworded account on the machine (that I can find so
> far) seems to be 'startup'. Any ideas on how to 'break in' without an OS
> install floppy/tape?

I've just had an idea... would it be possible to hook the drive up using
a PC/XT drive controller in one of my computers running Linux and mount
the filesystem on there? I know that there's problems with using ST-506
style harddisks on a controller other than what they've been formatted on,
but I'm hoping that it could work. I'm not planning on trying to modify
the filesystem, I'd just like to grab the encrypted rood password off of
the drive so I can try running it through a password cracker.

Let me know if anyone knows if this is possible. I'm guessing, worst
case, the drive are only 41MB, so I could just search through the drive
sector-by-sector until I found something that looked like the password
file.

-- Pat
Received on Wed Sep 18 2002 - 19:08:00 BST