Mint 19 --forgotten user password reset failed.

1bSpanMan · 05-17-2019, 10:21 PM

Went on a 5 week trip and forgot my Mint 19.0 user password. Sole user, no root password.Tried to use an 18.3 live CD to boot, and use the following commands:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo chroot /mnt
passwd <name of your account>
exit
sudo umount /mnt
exit

When I tried to enter the user account name I was told no such user. Since I am the only account, I tried using simply <passwd> without any account name. This let me enter a new Unix password and said it was successful, but when I rebooted into Mint 19.0 it still won't accept the new password, although it doesn't say its invalid. it just asks me to login again.
Have I totally screwed things up, or can I still find a method to get back in?

/dev/random · 05-17-2019, 10:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1bSpanMan

Went on a 5 week trip and forgot my Mint 19.0 user password. Sole user, no root password.Tried to use an 18.3 live CD to boot, and use the following commands:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo chroot /mnt
passwd <name of your account>
exit
sudo umount /mnt
exit

When I tried to enter the user account name I was told no such user. Since I am the only account, I tried using simply <passwd> without any account name. This let me enter a new Unix password and said it was successful, but when I rebooted into Mint 19.0 it still won't accept the new password, although it doesn't say its invalid. it just asks me to login again.
Have I totally screwed things up, or can I still find a method to get back in?

1) At boot (before grub) hold down the ESC key
2) Select the Entry you want to boot and press 'e'
3) Find the kernel line, change ro to rw init=/bin/sh
4) Press F10
5) It will boot into single user mode so run passwd on either root or your user and change your password.
6) ???
7) Profit!