I haven't messed around with my Beaglebone black in a while so I did a little searching and got it booting under a Slackware minirootfs but I can't login. Mounting the SD card in my laptop I tried to chroot so I could set a root password doesn't seem to work due to the different architecture. I can edit shadow and blank it out but then can't get in due to ssh not allowing a blank password. Any easy way to set the root password or add a new user so I can put the card back in and boot from it and get in?

Sure, copy the password hash from /etc/shadow on the machine you do know the password for and paste it into etc/shadow of the file system you've mounted; save it; umount and boot.
Are you sure that it's not a case that the sshd config won't let you login as root?
Look at etc/ssh/sshd_config in the file system first and let yourself login if it's not configured to do so.

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Ahh, so the hash is the same across any machine. I guess I should have known that or KEON wouldn't work at $workplace$ (I was windows admin, not unix). I did set the PermitRootLogon in sshd, but IIRC blank passwords are disallowed as well.

I thought I read somewhere that only works for non root users but of course I can't find it now. I thought I saw that back when the permitrootlogon changed.

OT but I still need to figure out what to do lone term. I usually have my boxen with /home mounted on another physical drive so if I loose a server I can just plug the drive in my laptop and go from there. But I can't login as me and su to root if my /home is fubar. I'm trying to decide between just having a skeleton /home/me that gets overridden by the mount or script out a backdoor account whose home isn't under /home.