man, do I feel like an idiot. What exactly do you do when you loose a root password? Reinstall? Treat it as a "learning experience" and crack it?

It's worse, because it's mac os x... i had to *choose* to activate the root account and take those privileges away from the standard admin account.

Yikes infryq! That's really bad. My ex-boyfriend did the same (though with Linux), and I'm afraid the only solution I know of is to reinstall. I must admit, I don't know MacOS X that well, so I have no idea if it has a "rescue" function of some sorts.

So all I can say is.. Good luck, girl. :)

I was given 2 HP-UX machines... unfortunately the guy who gave them to me doesn't remember the root passwords...
I was thinking of building a remembering device from an old toilet plunger and some packaging tape....

http://www.securemac.com/macosxsingleuser.php has instructions for getting OSX into single user mode, wherein you are root without needing passwords, and can change said root passwords.

Gian, I expect better of you next time. A google for "HP-UX single user" had a first result saying this:

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Subject: 8.3 How do I boot into single user mode?

Press ESC to stop the auto-boot.
When the list of boot devices is presented:

b PX ISL (where X is your root disc)

And at the ISL> prompt:

HP-UX9.x: ISL> hpux -iS disc(;0)/hp-ux
HP-UX-10.x: ISL> hpux -iS disc(;0)/stand/vmunix

The '-iS' are the flags to init which says come up single user. The rest
of the command is what the bootprocess does automatically.

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Piffle.

Thankyou so very, very much buzgub.... that worked like a dream. Now I just won't forget it anymore, and everything will be peachy.

And gian -- duct tape works better for that.