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I Forgot My Password

Today's digital world is guarded by keys. Keys in the form of passwords or passphrases or whatever you want to call it. It's about 12 to 15 characters long and without it you lose access to information and communication. You even lose proof of identity.

I use Linux and occasionally I forget my administrative password. Here's how to recover from such tragedies.

Reboot your computer.

Hold the shift key to get to the GRUB menu. What you are after is to boot to the recovery mode of your kernel. Once the menus presents itself use the arrow keys to highlight the particular kernel (recovery mode) and hit enter.

You want to be root and again just highlight the particular item on the menu presented. Then press enter. It should drop you to a shell like so:

root@desktop:#

You are now in a read-only file. To change that type:

root@desktop:#mount -rw -o remount /

Then to set a password for a user type:

root@desktop:#passwd username

Type the new Unix password:

Retype the new Unix password:

And that's it. Reboot once more. Use the new password to login.


--
Donato Roque@desktop
mobile:   63-9185721710
I'm on twitter and facebook. Check out my blog.
Consider using my pgp keys for privacy.

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