[synthetix]

I have a hard drive that came out of a machine used at a high end visual effects house that I don't know the login/password for. I want to see what's on it. Would it be possible to connect the disk as a second drive in an existing system and read the files that way?

[hamei]

Would it be possible to connect the disk as a second drive in an existing system and read the files that way?

Yes. In fact, that's the easiest quickest way to bypass the password ... while you're in there, you might want to delete the root password, too.

[synthetix]

Would it be possible to connect the disk as a second drive in an existing system and read the files that way?

Yes. In fact, that's the easiest quickest way to bypass the password ... while you're in there, you might want to delete the root password, too.

Cool. How would I do that, just edit /etc/passwd on the second disk?

[Raion]

If /etc/passwd contains the crypt hashes, then yeah. Just swap with a known root password crypt hash, and you should be good. If it doesn't check, for /etc/shadow. You can do the same thing there.