It’s happened to everybody, having a lot of passwords and one of them just slipping our mind, and If your like me, the safest place for passwords is my head, nowhere else do I have passwords. Well here’s an easy way to regain your shell on a Linux box.
1 – Reboot your computer and wait ’till the Grub Boot Menu shows up…
2 – Now go to your Linux boot option and type e
3 – At the end of the boot menu line just type in: init=/bin/bash
4 – Now type b, and you will regain you shell, but wait, that’s not all…
After you regain your shell, your going to have to edit some files, so we’re going to have to mount our filesystem,
5 – Type this in: mount -o rw,remount / and now you have access to all your files..
6 – Now edit your /etc/passwd and/or the /etc/shadow and find the root user line
7 – Remove everything between the first two colons of the root passwd entry; it should end up looking like this “root::…”
8 – Save the file
9 – Type sync and give it an enter a couple of times, to make sure the filesystem syncs your modified data
10 – Reboot and Login as root
11 – Now type in passwd and change your password for the root user.
12 – Violá, you’ve got full access to your system again.
Enjoy,
Rick
