my son is having trouble with his mint install. after installing and setting up a user account in the process, mint forgets the password.

he can't log in under the "mint" user either.

mint 14 mate 32 bit

have you tried using the "root" login? If so I can give you the steps to follow to get the system into single user mode to reset it. I've never heard of a "mint" username before but its been a few versions since I ran Mint.

On second thought its probably good practice to learn this. Go through these steps to boot into single user mode and reset the password/create users.



Reboot your computer / Turn your computer on.
Hold down the Shift key at the start of the boot process to enable the GNU GRUB boot menu (if it does not show)
Press ESC at the GNU GRUB prompt.
Press e for edit.
Use the Arrow keys to highlight the line that begins with kernel and press the e key.
Go to the very end of the line and add rw init=/bin/bash
Press Enter and then press b to boot your system.
Your system will boot up to a passwordless root shell.
Type in passwd yourusername
Set your new password.
Restart your system.

he got it figured out. he was "reinstalling" to the wrong partition, and never over-wrote his original mint install..... he had had another distro of linux on one partition and installed mint to the other one. when he went to "reinstall" he had been installing to the first partition, not the second.

i had seen the article about the [left shift] entry into a root command prompt, which was going to be what i was going to have him try next, but he got it reinstalled correctly first.