reset to factory default

[jacques@abstraction.ch]

I'm a new pinephone user. When trying to connect as root, I do use "sudo su" and I gave my PIN code as password.
That work fine. I did some look up as root and exit from root.
Then I changed pas password in order to have my favorite password which is alphabetic. Then I shutdown my phone.
On restart, the pinephone ask my then PIN code as a number. But nor my old PIN does works, nor the sim card PIN. I suspect that changing the password for the main user should be restricted to a numeric sequence in order to be able to answer the PIN code question with the new password.

So, now I'm perfectly blocked and, I thing, the only solution should be to restart from factory setup.

Does somebody knows how to do ?

Regards

Jacques

[jlucas]

Hello and welcome,

One of the great things about the PinePhone is that it lets you boot an OS from the SD card.
You can use several methods that require booting from an SD card in order to re-flash the OS to the internal storage (eMMC), which would basically work as the "factory reset" that you're asking, or you can choose to install a different OS.

I do encourage you to try out other OSs on the SD card to see which one you're more comfortable with. There's an OS list in the Pine64 wiki.
However, that shouldn't be necessary in order to reset your password.

If you have sshd enabled on your PinePhone, you can ssh into it and change the password from there.

If you have a dock or any USB-C OTG cable, you can use it to plug a USB keyboard to the phone.
Then you switch to a tty ( Ctrl + Alt + {F1..F6} ).
Then you simply log in with your username and password and reset the password to a numeric one with the `passwd` command.

If none of these works for you, then you can do the following:
Flash an OS to the SD card. It shouldn't matter which OS you choose, maybe just go with the same one that came pre-installed on the eMMC.
Boot from that SD card.
Mount the partitions of the eMMC and `chroot` into it.
Change the password with `passwd`

This last one shouldn't be too hard, but depending on how comfortable you are with the command line, you might find it more convenient to just re-flash the OS (For that check the "JumpDrive" section on the wiki page I linked. Alternatively use this method).