Setting A Boot Password - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 11 - ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 17-03-2009 Administration Manual

from a mounted file system. Some BIOSes have a faulty LBA support implementation,
--force-lba provides a solution to ignore them.

10.1.4 Setting a Boot Password

Even before the operating system is booted, GRUB enables access to file systems. Users
without root permissions can access files in your Linux system to which they have no
access once the system is booted. To block this kind of access or to prevent users from
booting certain operating systems, set a boot password.
IMPORTANT: Boot Password and Splash Screen
If you use a boot password for GRUB, the usual splash screen is not displayed.
As the user root, proceed as follows to set a boot password:
1 At the root prompt, encrypt the password using grub-md5-crypt:
2 Paste the encrypted string into the global section of the file menu.lst:
3 To prevent one or several operating systems from being booted from the boot
102 Administration Guide
# grub-md5-crypt
Password: ****
Retype password: ****
Encrypted: $1$lS2dv/$JOYcdxIn7CJk9xShzzJVw/
gfxmenu (hd0,4)/message
color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
password --md5 $1$lS2dv/$JOYcdxIn7CJk9xShzzJVw/
Now GRUB commands can only be executed at the boot prompt after pressing
P and entering the password. However, users can still boot all operating systems
from the boot menu.
menu, add the entry lock to every section in menu.lst that should not be
bootable without entering a password. For example:
title linux
kernel (hd0,4)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 vga=791
initrd (hd0,4)/initrd
lock