Broke my sudoers password, how do I reset it without using sudo?

Question

I thought it would be a good idea to finally take the password off my little netbook since it has never actually been of any use, and has mostly just slowed down . But when I went to change my password, there wasn't even an option to make it blank, and any attempt to make it a few easy characters was met with "Password too weak".

So I did what any good geek would do and popped open the terminal, read the manual entry for passwd and quickly used the -d option to remove the password from my account. It all went well for a couple days (I even managed to also make my keychain password blank) until I tried to update the thing.

My sudoers password is not blank, and it's not my old password. I have no idea what it is. How do I reset it (or even better, make it blank) without the use of the sudo command?

Since the fix is to reset the password (and the problem lies in the password entry itself), this is in effect the same as How do I reset a lost administrative password? We should probably close this as a duplicate of that. — Eliah Kagan, Mar 18 '13 at 03:07

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 13 '12 at 20:26

3

Go to terminal type who am i then type passwd and enter the password you want. You will be able to use that password to change your password on user accounts.

answered Oct 13 '12 at 20:26

Isaac Lo

46

how can he do that from terminal with out sudo ? – Raja G Oct 14 '12 at 07:11
1

A user can change his own password without sudo. – Mark Paskal Oct 14 '12 at 07:38

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 14 '12 at 12:14

If you messed up your sudoers file, you'll need to:

Reboot into recovery mode (hit escape during boot, choose the recovery mode option on the grub screen)
Choose the 'Enable networking' option (if you don't your filesystem will be mounted as read-only. who knew)
Chosee the 'Drop to root shell' option
Run visudo, fix your file
Reboot with normal grub option

source :- http://mario.net.au/content/recover-etcsudoers-ubuntu-1204

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 13 '12 at 20:46

0

You can install linux on machine without losing data . only be carefull aboout that use same username . if you want really cracking password i will look for it

answered Oct 13 '12 at 20:46

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 14 '12 at 07:10

0

After switch on your PC , you will see GRUB menu . In the GRUB menu choose recovery mode and then choose root option . there type this command

passwd

Then Give your new password .

then restart.

answered Oct 14 '12 at 07:10

Raja G

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Broke my sudoers password, how do I reset it without using sudo?

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