password not accepted on antergos
 

I installed Antergos and created a twelve character password. Unfortunately, when I went to enter the password it was rejected. I need to, using the terminal, find my current password. Barring that I need to create a 'new' password that will be accepted.

Any and all help is appreciated.

herakles_14

you mean on the command line, after booting? with something unspectacular like 'login: '?
how exactly was it rejected?
please describe the process.
does your password contain characters beyond a-z,A-Z,0-9?

herakles_14,

First write down a new password.

Next, boot from the Antergos installation DVD or USB drive and open a terminal.

I will assume that the root partition is /dev/sda1 and the username is herakles.

Press Enter after each of the following 4 commands.

Type the new password (not displayed) and press Enter.

Retype the new password and press Enter.

Exit and reboot without the Antergos DVD/USB drive.

Ondoho;

Yes, when I use the word ‘terminal’ I mean the ‘commandline’

I rebooted and at the appropriate moment selected “Antergos”.
Before the login screen came up there were some entries at the top of a black screen (terminal like)They did not stay up long enough for me to write them down.

The last one, which I did copy read like this:
“Unable to retrieve the name of the device” I don't know what it meant by that?

It continued and a second or two later the Login Screen showed up. I entered my password, and the only character in it that was not [a-z A-Z 0-9] was this one: ^

A red error screen/window appeared and read like this:
“Uh Oh Authentication failed. Please try again.”

I rebooted to my MX-17 Linux Horizon distro and came here.

herakles_14

beachboy2

The ‘root’ partition is /dev/sda4. The User name is ‘abzurdity’.

I presently have four partitions and they are as follows:

/dev/sda1 MX-17 Horizon

/dev/sda2 Linux Mint 18.3

/dev/sda3 Fedora 27 Workstation


Which bring us to:

/dev/sda4 Antergos 18 (I believe)


To install any of the distros I have to go through the BIOS of my “Dell Optiflex 780”. Now on the Antergos disc there is an option to ‘Boot into the Hard disc’

If I can do what you suggested would I follow the commands only making slight changes?

herakles_14

this description sounds like a graphical login.
so i take it your problem is not about grub and partitions etc., but really about authentication on antergos.

i'm not sure about having '^' as a valid character in a password.
it's in different places on different keyboard layouts, and maybe you used a en_US layout during install, and a localized layout later?
that's why these sort of characters are not usually recommended (although Linux CAN handle them).

edit: unless you can figure out the actual password, you need to follow beachboy2's chroot method.
or maybe you can try different keyboard layouts in the login manager.

I decided to simply reinstall Antergos. I did try to use beachboy2's method but without any luck. I did spend most of yesterday looking for a way to change the keyboard layouts from standard; QWERTY to
COLEMAK. I installed Anterrgos with a Deepin Environment and from the Control Center was able to change the layout to what I've been using 'Colemak' for the past several years.

heraakles_14

^ so it WAS a keyboard layout problem...
the general suggestion is to use a simple password first (one that you can reproduce on ANY keyboard layout) and change that later when you are sure how things are set up.

you could also have backuped & edited /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow directly from a live environment (disclaimer: haven't actually done this myself, but saw it on forums as a working solution), but i didn't want to recommend it because the chroot thing seemed like the safer method...