passwd / can't log in
01-23-2020, 09:07 PM
You should be able to make a bootable sd card and boot into it. The sd card will likely auto mount the internal drive, or you can find it with sudo fdisk -l and mount it.
Then as root, you can use the chroot command to set the new root to the mounted drive and use passwd to make the change.
Google "linux change root password chroot" and you will get plenty of detailed info on how to do it.
If you make the sd card a different distro (I'm using "Bionic Mate Community Build Image [microSD Boot] by ayufan") you will have the second distribution to play with as well. Note that Ubuntu uses rock64 instead of rock as the default user & password. It also defaults to not allowing root to log in so you will have to use "sudo su" or sudo -i" in a terminal to get root.
Then as root, you can use the chroot command to set the new root to the mounted drive and use passwd to make the change.
Google "linux change root password chroot" and you will get plenty of detailed info on how to do it.
If you make the sd card a different distro (I'm using "Bionic Mate Community Build Image [microSD Boot] by ayufan") you will have the second distribution to play with as well. Note that Ubuntu uses rock64 instead of rock as the default user & password. It also defaults to not allowing root to log in so you will have to use "sudo su" or sudo -i" in a terminal to get root.