Extreme Newbie here to Linux and computers in general.

My dad recently passed away leaving me with a Linux system. I am not very advanced in computers, Windows, Linux or any other systems or brands . He on the other hand was advanced in computers, especially Linux.
I have used his system before in the past but that was after he had been using it that day, so it wasnt all locked down at those times. I have figured out a few of the passwords that he had put on it but I did not see this one, or even knew it was on there. He put a lock on the keyboard and mouse so that after it boots up and you enter the main user account, his, and not a guests, windows start popping up and one of them is the keyboard and mouse password window. I dont know the password, and I have no clue what it is or how to take it off or bypass it till I can figure out the password (if ever).

Sorry for your loss...
And welcome to the forum.

Okay, and...congrats with your own system...that's locked...bummer...
What are the goals? Keep using it? Or extract the data and rebuild a new install?

As far as resetting a root pass, this page may help, okay, it's Ubuntu, but let's start from there...
If you just want to extract (valuable) data, my method may help:

- get a Live CD (Knoppix is pretty helpfull)
- boot the PC with that disc
- pop into the console
- become Root "su-" on Knoppix
- find the hard drive "fdisk -l"
- mount the hard drive, mostly it's something liek "sda" or the like "mount /dev/sda1 /media"
- start the Midnight Commander (possibly the BEST thing ever invcented) "mc"
- the rest is pretty simple: go the the very top of the three, enter the folder called Media and browse the hard drive

What just happened? Well, the hard drivee was'nt copied to somewhere else, but "mounted" into the file system, that behaves like a tree. Anything (disk, USB stick CDrom anything) gets allocated into a folder as if it were a folder on the system, neat huh

Allow me to follow thif up...

And again, welcome

Thor

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the knowledge about the disk. That is very cool, but I was hoping to keep using his seeing as how it is a far superior system than my dinosaur of a Windows XP I am using now.
I will try Ubuntu. It seems easy to follow. lol
So I read the page over and it is describing how to take down the user password, which I have already taken off. Is it gonna erase any other password locked programs he has on his user account?

No, this is not how this works. On a system, you have users, each with a login and a password. Each user gets a home folder where all his/her stuff (pictures, settings, MP3's and the like) is kept, if you erase/disable a user, that folder does not go away...

There are ways to "crack" a system and reset the root password. Once you've gotten this far, it's a snap to make a new user and (as root) "funnel" everything from your dads folder to yours...

By te way, welcome to Linux, then. You'll love it, trust me...