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I changed my password this morning, which I do regularly, and apparently I made a mistake this time. When I rebooted, Ubuntu didn't recognize the new password.

I've tried every stupid-mistake-type-variation on the word and NOTHING works. (It's a combination of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols like # and %).

I tried to go back and change the password again, but without knowing the last change I made there's no possibility of doing that.

So now I can't get into some of my most important applications. I suppose I could delete Ubuntu (I just thought of this), reinstall it, and hope that the data is still accessible. Reinstalling all my applications would be a huge deal, though.

I surely hope someone has a suggestion.

Kent Smith in California

kentfx
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1 Answers1

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If your Hard-drive is not encrypted or anything, you could boot into runlevel 1, where you own root privileges and reset your password.

To do so, you need to edit the boot parameters in Grub when you boot up. When you see the Grub screen (if you don't see it, you may press Shift after your BIOS screen) select the entry that is normally started and press e. You should get a editing window, now append 1 to the line starting with linux. Hitting F10 should start the modified entry.

If that worked, you should be left with a root console. Here you can reset your password using passwd username

romed
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