I have purchased a used Compaq M2000 from a pawn shop. It appears to be in decent physical condition. It will boot to the log in screen, and I discovered if I hit the esc. key, it will boot in "verbose mode", whatever that means.

It is password protected, not the BIOS, but OS

I am fairly Windows proficient, but have never seen a machine with Linux installed. I might like to keep the OS if I can get into the OS and see what Linux is all about.

I have read several threads here plus some of the FAQs, but have failed to find an answer exactly. The following thread helped, but I still came up short trying to boot into single user mode.
http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=39916

If there is a way to retrieve or disable the password, I would like to try that to see what Linux is about. If not, perhaps someone can guide me through an fdisk and format if the windows Boot disks with fdisk and format will work on a linux based system.

The machine does not have a floppy drive, therefor I suspect I may be creating a bootable CD.

Any help understanding this machine will be appreciated, advice on what I can do as well as what I cannot do will certainly help.

While trying to find my way past the log in screen in single user mode, I got just so far:

At the boot prompt, I typed Linux 1 (and hit enter)
The machine then added the following:
Telling INIT to go to single user mode.
INIT: going to single user
sh-3.00# ( I tried su at this point and received the following).
Su (Pam_Unix) (2326): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
root@localhost /1#

This is a far as I can go...it wants something added after the /1# but I don't have a clue where to go next.

Thank you very much for your time.

Rob

(BTW, my user name, Bovon can be found at several windows forums, Sysopt, TECHimo, Extreme PC Central and others. This tid bit is just to inform you that I am not a computer newbie looking for a way to get into someone Else's machine that is not mine..)

Would it not be better to install a fresh copy of GNU/Linux? Then you can observe the whole process from begining to end. It's better than taking on someone else's install, for all you know it might be in an unstable state and that's highly unlikely to give you a fair overview of GNU/Linux. Grab yourself one of the many available Live Distros (e.g. Mandriva One, PClinuxOS etc), simply boot from one and explore the world of GNU/Linux with that. If you are happy with what you see, there's an option on the desktop to install it to hard drive.

You can do it. If you've gotten root access, then you can just add yourself a user:



replace username with whatever you want your new user to be. Then do:



again, replace username with the user you just created and set a password for them. But ideally, it would be better to create a clean install with whatever you want to do. However, with this you can reboot and then login with the user you just created.



I'm not sure how this convinces me that your not looking for a way into someone elses machine

It could be seen as your not a computer newbie, but a Linux newbie trying to get into Linux on someone else's machine

I'm just joking, but at least you can get into the machine now

However, I recommend a clean install. You don't know what is with the existing install, it could be full of backdoors that someone can gain access to if you start using it, obtaining all your passwords. Although, then again maybe not also.

Welcome to the board