Hello,

Several months ago I installed Ubuntu 9.04 to my Laptop and now I've forgetten the root user's password (which I myself set!) therefore I cannot login as root.

I remember arranging one more user (in addition to the root user) and I do remember that user and its password, but it's only a normal user I don't know how exactly you call it, desktop user, power user, etc.

Anyway... when I log in as that normal user and try this:

it says it's not in the sudoer's list (and that my attempt will be reported).

The problem is, I cannot exactly remember the root users User Name (UN) either, nor the Password (PW). I 'm likely to remember the PW better than remembering the correct combination of UN & PW, that's why I tried to sudo -i from the normal user's account, i.e. with the hope of having a chance to enter only the root PW, not the combination of root UN & PW.

So I wonder what can I do now. I don't wanna re-install Ubuntu all over, is there a quick solution to this? Any comments and links to solution are appreciated, thanks.

Boot from a live cd, 'chroot' into the disk installation and type 'passwd' as root.

or:

Boot to single user mode (if roots password isn't required) delete the password hash from /etc/shadow

The first method is cleaner

cheers

Whilst kbp's suggestions will work just fine I am a little confused as the installation of Ubuntu by default does not create a root password.
Or is your 'root user' the initial user, who is in the sudo list, that you are required to create?

1 members found this post helpful.

I concur with grail. Unless you specifically ran "sudo passwd" after the install, root password will not be set. If not, do it.

Cheers, Lou

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the guidance. After continually using the Mac OS X for the last 4 months, I'm glad to get back to Linux on my laptop.

Booting to single user mode and then setting root password by #passwd has allowed me to set the root password. Then I've logged in again in single user mode and examined the /etc/shadow file. There I spotted the user name which I 've forgotten and that was it, later I easily logged in with that user name, because I knew the password.

The problem was basically that I had forgotten user name of that specific user... and now it's ok. It's very fortunate that Linux permits setting root PW in so-called the single user mode.

Many thanks!

Glad you got a solution, please mark as SOLVED.