Recovering an EX-750 Root Password

This technical note explains how to recover, reset, or restore, the root account password on an SonicWALL / Aventail EX-750 v8.x appliance. It does not apply to the Aventail Management Console (AMC) GUI administrator account passwords.

- Boot the appliance while connected to the serial port.
- Press the "ESC" key. You should see the following displayed:

GRUB loading stage2...

- Press the "ESC" key to enter the menu. NOTE: You must do this quickly.
- You should see a menu similar to the following (varies appliance by appliance):

GRUB version 0.93 (621K lower / 104748K upper memory)
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| fsl-purr 2.4.20 (Xda1)
| app 2.4.20_22 (Xda6)
|
|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

- One of the above will be highlighted; the highlighted one is your working/production partition. Make a note of it (such as Xda6, Xda7, or Xda8; it should not be Xda1). This will eventually be the root partition you'll edit.
- Using the up/down arrow keys on your keyboard, select:

fsl-purr 2.4.20 (Xda1)

- Press "ENTER" to boot to it.

- You'll see all of the kernel boot information scrolling by and then it may result in a command prompt caused by a failed fsck.

- Press CONTROL-D to continue and you will get to the fsl-purr login prompt.
- Login as root (no password required).

- Previously at the GRUB menu you noted which partition was initially highlighted (it should be Xda6, Xda7, or Xda8). Mount this partition replacing the 'X' with a 'h' (for example Xda6 would be hda6):

mount -t ext3 /dev/hda6 /mnt

- Edit the root password of that partition:
- vi /mnt/etc/shadow
- NOTE: you may also need to set your term type to "VT100" using this command:

export TERM=vt100

- Now replace the following line:

root:x:11753:0:99999:7:::

- With this...

root::11753:0:99999:7:::

- Save the file and then exit by typing this:

:wq

- Unmount the partition (for example for hda6):

umount /dev/hda6

- Reboot:

reboot or shutdown -r now

- Do *not* do anything with GRUB when it reboots. Let it boot automatically. It should boot up on the default partition.

- When the login screen appears, log in as root; no password will be required.

- Immediately change the password using the Linux password change utility. Type and enter:

passwd

- Type the new password. You will be prompted to confirm it. SonicWALL recommends using the password you use for the AMC admin account. If you change the AMC admin account password, the root password will be changed to match.