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cstamas
Asked: 2015-01-29 01:35:06 +0800 CST

How to boot to shell with Solaris?

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I would like to boot Solaris to shell (root prompt) directly for recovery purposes. On linux I would pass a kernel option init=/bin/bash and it would directly boot me into shell without asking for password. How can I achieve the same for Solaris?

I realized the '-s' parameter, but that still asks for password. The official docs suggest booting an installer CD which I would like to avoid.

UPDATE I realized that another proprietary access method was available for me so this question is not that urgent for me, still I leave it up as it maybe interesting later and for others as well.

This is solaris 11 express on x86 hardware.

Both single mode -s and -m milestone=none asks for password:

Enter user name for system maintenance (control-d to bypass): root
Enter root password (control-d to bypass):
solaris

1 Answers

  1. Use the milestone=none boot flag:

    If you are on SPARC, from the openboot prompt:

    ok boot -m milestone=none

    If you are on x86, adjust the grub boot entry the same way. The precise command will depend on the Solaris release.

    Edit:

    Not sure why you want to avoid booting from a CD but that's the simplest way to recover a lost root password. The alternatives seems overkill:

    • moving the disk to another Solaris on x86 machine, import its root pool and fix the password

    • installing a PXE boot server, boot from the network, import the pool, fix the password

    • find a remote server user account having passwordless ssh access to root or a user having the root role or sudo access on the target server.

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