✅ Lost Ubuntu user password

[iron violet]

I have lost Ubuntu 's password how can i recover it

[plucky oxide]

if it's not an encryption password then the recovery boot option might have something. basically you can boot to it as root and use it to change the user password

[gritty wind]

alternatively if it's the root password they've lost can't they mount it in an iso and then just run 'passwd', assuming not encryption still of course.

[iron violet]

Will the date be lost

[gritty wind]

If it’s encrypted you will need the password, if it’s not data should not be lost.

If it’s the root password your changing boot an iso and chroot in, then do passwd if it’s a user password just log in to root on a tty and do passwd <user> replacing g <user> with the username you’re changing the password for

[iron violet]

how do I know if it is encrypted ?

[gritty wind]

because you'd have encrypted it? 😂

basically chroot in, and if you can mount it and see what's inside, it's not encrypted

don't even need to chroot

just mount from the iso

if it's btrfs mount the subvol

wait, I know your next quesiton, 'how do I know if it's btrfs'
do lsblk -f

[iron violet]

i try th "mount -rw -o remount /" and
"passwd (username) "
some command suggestion come to line

[gritty wind]

lsblk -f

which one is your root?

look for /dev/<drive>

then mount /dev/<root drive> /mnt

replace <root drive> with that information

I'll give an example

The top one is /dev/sda1, and that is mounted at /boot/efi

so if it wasn't mounted and I wanted to mount it there it'd be mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi

or if I was mounting sdb3, which is btrfs, I'd do this:
mount -t subvol=@ /dev/sdb3 /mnt
and then it would be mounted at /mnt

let me know if that makes sense @iron violet

[iron violet]

ah can you tell me the full process ?
i want to roots and type this command "mount -rw -o remount /"
and after that i write the "passwd (username)"

after that command suggestion come and i don't know what to do

[iron violet]

I don't know what is my roots . this has dual boot setup . and the owner of this PC is my father but my father forget the password

[gritty wind]

I don't know where you're getting that from?

show me lsblk -f

[iron violet]

ok

hang on there for while

[gritty wind]

there are three types of file system you should be aware of:
vfat - for your bootloader, in your case almost definitely grub
ext4/btrfs/zfs etc. - your root, and if home is on its own partition, that as well
swap - used to supplement RAM, and is something that you need if you want your linux to hibernate

[iron violet]

also i can't access to ubuntu I hope you understand that

[gritty wind]

do you not have an ISO?

I don't think you'll be able to fix this easily without an ISO

I suppose you could boot up the ISO in a VM and attempt to pass your drive into the ISO, not sure how easy that would be though

[iron violet]

i didn't use it in the VM

[gritty wind]

I didn't say you did

[plucky oxide]

press esc during boot, you should see the grub screen. from there go to advanced options and then the first that says (recovery mode)
in the menu go to root, press enter, then passwd [your username]
enter the password, confirm, and reboot

i don't know how if it's encrypted

[gritty wind]

that's nifty

I'm gonna try that now for my own machine, didn't know you could just do that

[plucky oxide]

I installed it to try that 😆

[iron violet]

I did this

but it didn't work

[plucky oxide]

the entire process?

[iron violet]

yes
but the problem is my father's user name has 3 word

that's the problem

[plucky oxide]

so you don't remember it?

or do you mean with spaces

[gritty wind]

doesn't work on arch, I'll have to vm ubuntu

[plucky oxide]

yeah the recovery thing is an Ubuntu

[gritty wind]

are you a sudoer?

[iron violet]

what does that mean ?

[gritty wind]

how much experience do you have with linux?

[iron violet]

very little

[gritty wind]

is this machine yours or your dads?

[iron violet]

i use linux mint for 6 days

i but i wanted to learn linux

[plucky oxide]

ls /home after you're in the root menu, usually the username is the same as the home folder

[gritty wind]

but is the machine / system yours or your dads?

[iron violet]

my dads

[iron violet]

ok thanks

[honest token]

coco | windows received a thank you cookie!

[gritty wind]

does he know that you're playing around with it?

[iron violet]

yep

my brother install the ubuntu so that my father can learn about linux but my father doesn't care about it and he forgets the password

[gritty wind]

and now you want to learn about linux?

[iron violet]

Yes

I always wanted but i thought ubuntu's password is strong so i didn't try it after few days ago i thought i should give it a try

[gritty wind]

okay, that's fine, just making sure you're not like, trying to hack your dad's laptop

[iron violet]

no no

my father's main work is in windows
and i can easily access it . there is nothing in ubuntu

[gritty wind]

I'll create an ubuntu VM just so I can go into the ISO after and help you change the passwords

[gritty wind]

I just want to thank ubuntu for telling me everything installed correctly and then doing this for bootup:

I'll try to get a response to you soon.

[gritty wind]

@iron violet what you can do is just get pretty much any linux iso I think, ubuntu or arch should be fine. If it's ubuntu, do the 'try it' option, might take some time to load, then load terminal and do lsblk -f and look for the root partition, if you don't know which it is post a picture, then do mount /dev/<root partition> /mnt and then chroot /mnt, and it's simply a case after that of doing:
passwd <user>
passwd <root>
they can have the same passwords if you want, and assuming you got a successful password change do: exit and then shutdown now remove the iso and then start the machine up and go into ubuntu.
If you use the arch iso you'll start in TTY (essentially terminal) and the above commands should still work, I don't know specifically what other ISO's look like

[plucky oxide]

install ubuntu and try my method

[gritty wind]

you mean nuke their ubuntu and start with a fresh install?

[plucky oxide]

no

[plucky oxide]

you install Ubuntu and try my method lol

[gritty wind]

might as well

[gritty wind]

yeah I've got it installed, if I do that it needs the root password, which presumably ironer doesn't have

the chroot method needs no password unless the drive is encrypted

[plucky oxide]

yeah but it probably doesn't have a password. they said their issue was with the username being 3 words

[gritty wind]

root on ubuntu takes on password of user it was made with

[plucky oxide]

idk I installed it with the user as admin and it didn't require me for a root password to do the passwd part

[gritty wind]

Don't know what to tell you?

[plucky oxide]

I just pressed enter when it asked for the password ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[gritty wind]

did you enter a password for the user?

[plucky oxide]

nope

[gritty wind]

as I said, ubuntu sets the root up with the same password as the user

that's why you could just press enter

[gritty wind]

How did you set ubuntu up without a user password?

[plucky oxide]

wait I'm trying it again

I said I didn't have to enter the password, not that I didn't install it with one

[plucky oxide]

apparently there isn't "as an admin"?

[gritty wind]

ahhh when I said enter a password for the user I meant on the screen I linked afterwards

I see the mis-communication now 🙂

[plucky oxide]

ok tried again. su didn't work with the user password so no root login, and in recovery mode I could press enter

[plucky oxide]

this is getting a bit offtopic lol but since ⬆️ was their issue then the next step can be to use ls /home to get the actual username

[gritty wind]

If they have any issues with passwords with your way then they should be able to do it my way using the ls /home once they've chrooted

[plucky oxide]

yep

[gritty wind]

nevermind, you're right on that grub advanced options bit!

I suspect what caused an issue for me is that it happened after I reset both the user and root password manually

[iron violet]

mounting an ISO is kinda hard for me because i didn't get some point that you mention

[gritty wind]

Well you’ve been given two methods on how to proceed, one from me and one from coco. If you need help with them then post what issue you’re running into, if you don’t then please close the thread by making it as solved

[iron violet]

ok i will try this in when i will be free then i will give update about it

[cold juniper]

@iron violet boot an liveiso thru USB, open terminal, run
lsblk to get disk details, suppose your root partition is /dev/nvme0n1p1 you need to run

sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt

next run

sudo su
mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys && mount --make-rslave /mnt/sys

mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc && mount --make-rslave /mnt/proc

mount --rbind /dev/ mnt/dev && mount --make-rslave /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
passwd # this will change root password
passwd username # this will change password of your user

[gritty wind]

you don't need to do all of that, as per the two solutions coco and I have provided 🙂

[gritty wind]

^^^

[gritty wind]

^^^

[cold juniper]

i dont think just chrooting will work properly

you need to mount psuedo fs afaik

[gritty wind]

I installed an ubuntu VM to test it, it worked

[cold juniper]

good then 👍

[iron violet]

Thank you
Your method work @plucky oxide
Now i can enter Ubuntu

[honest token]

coco | windows received a thank you cookie!

[plucky oxide]

yw

[gritty wind]

You should edit the title to say solved

[iron violet]

Ok

lost Ubuntu Password [Solved]