I vaguely remember creating a password for my Mint/Sarah version of Linux. Of course I wrote it down, but now I can't find it. How can I recover this program with files?

cbrookej

Boot from a USB live image, login as root, mount the disk's root partition or volume, chroot to the mount point, change the password, exit, umount, reboot without the USB.

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I am not a geek; I don't even understand your terms. I still have not been able to get into my Linux program. I wonder if it might be simpler to simple uninstall it and reinstall it.

cbrookej

Hi,

Well, the solution is complicated, so unfortunately you'll have to potentially learn a little bit and also learn that this is a thing to avoid in the future. Or the other option is to do as you cite, to uninstall/reinstall, or rather to just "install fresh" and obliterate whatever remains there.

If interested in giving the recovery option a try:

What smallpond is saying is that you likely had an original install media such as a thumbstick or DVD that you booted from when you installed Mint.

You can use that to live boot. It boots and gives you the option to install, but you don't have to install, you can just boot.

Then you can find your hard drive where you do have the existing install and there is a file containing an encoded password.

You can edit that file to remove the password.

I followed the link by "!!!" just to view the title and that is a guide to restore the password in Mint.

So please indicate which direction you prefer and we can either support you with help on a restore, or answer questions regarding a re-install.

Thank you for the more detailed information. I think this is far enough over my head that I will have to get professional help.

As long as you don't have anything you want to keep, you could certainly reinstall the OS.