Okay, I am having a problem here... What I have is a dell c610 laptop that I have a 30gb hard drive that has Ubuntu 6.06 installed on it. A friend of mine loaded Ubuntu 7.1 with all the bells and whistles onto a 40gb hard drive and sent it to me and gave me directions on how to copy my /etc/group , etc/passwd , and etc/shadow (from the 6.06 Ubuntu) onto the new drive (7.1 Ubuntu) by placing it into an external hard drive case and hooking it to my laptop. The problem is that when I did that, and looked at the files on the external hard drive, all the file names looked like they were written by the aliens that crashed in Roswell N.M. all those years ago. So, determined to get through it, I used a live CD and booted up that way... The problem is now that it seems that all the files that I need to alter, I can not reset the permissions on... I am still looking and searching the internet but as yet, I have not found a solution that works... Since he planned for me to be able to reset the password the way he planned, he did not keep track of the password...

Has someone ever done this before? and if so can you give me guidance...
Please help me...

Also, some of the directions I have seen say "mount the drive with the files on it... exactly what do they mean "mount" does that just mean to go there, or navigate to it?

Thanks in advance...

You can reset the permissions using sudo, but you will need the original installer's username and password. That's because the original installer of Ubuntu was put into the admin group, and hence gets to run sudo. If you want to stay logged in as "root", then issue sudo -i.

You'll need to log in as that user, and you can change permissions from there.

That is the problem... I don't have the original password... I can see what the user name is, because it shows it in the lower right section of the login screen, but the password has been forgotten. Is there no way to log on to the internal hard drive as root from the live cd or to remove or reset the user password on the internal hard drive? The searches that I have done on the internet all mention resetting the password with the live cd, but when I try to do what it mentions, I am unable to gain control of the permissions on the files that I need to change... So far, this is not going as advertised...

Have you tired booting into single user mode?

Okay, I have successfully gained access to my new hard drive...
I had booted up the computer that way before but what I was doing once I got there was all wrong.
What I did this time that worked was as follows... During boot up I hit the esc key and it came up with several selections (one of which was for recovery) after a bunch of lines of text, it finally gave a prompt... there I typed "passwd root" to reset the root password, then I logged in as root and reset the user passwd in the same way. The user name was tim, so I typed "passwd tim", again I was prompted for the new password. I entered what I wanted it to be and then I restarted the machine and it worked perfectly...

Thanks for the advice and asking the right question, custangro.

nm_pepper