I just got locked out of my Linux machine (details here) for reasons I am still trying to determine (see the link). I tried to recover my password but, unfortunately, all my most recent Live CDs I’ve left at work. All I have with me is an old Karmic installer, incidentally, the first Ubuntu I ever tried to install (and failed miserably more due to hubris and absence of mind—but that’s another story).
So from the Live CD, I was able to mount my Linux partition fine. Note that, I guess due to EFI and/or the tutorial I was following is just outdated, a mere sudo fdisk -l did not show me all my partitions; I had to use gparted (thankfully available with Karmic). But when I try to chroot, into my mounted partition, I get an exec format error which is apparently because my Karmic LiveCD is just 32-bit while the installation I am trying to salvage is 64-bit.
Thankfully, tinkering around with how Linux stores passwords, I got to reset my main account to have no password.
- Edit
/etc/passwd. Look for your username in the first of the colon-delimited fields. A typical line in the this file looks likebin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh. The ‘x’ in the second field means that the password for this account is encrypted. Remove the x so the line corresponding to your user becomes similar tobin::2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh. - Your actual password is stored in the
/etc/shadowfile. Open this file and, again, edit the line corresponding to your user to just have four colons after it like so:user::::. - Reboot. You should now be able to log-in passwordless. Remember to reset your password at once.
Note that to get my system to boot from LiveCD I had to tweak my BIOS yet again. I had to set my boot mode to Legacy and, after doing the steps outlined above, had to switch back to UEFI and disable Secure Boot. Man is BIOS dealing becoming traditional for me!