Have you forgotten your administrator password or the password of any user account on your Linux installation? Well, worry not, because we are going to show you how to change it without needing a live installation of Linux.
Things you will need:
- Know your way around a Linux terminal.
You can change the password of any user account in these easy steps:
- Enter recovery mode: To enter recovery mode press and hold down the shift key as the computer starts to boot.
This is what recovery mode looks like:
- Select the one that says (recovery mode) from the list.
- Now you will see a recovery menu on your screen, Scroll down that list and select the option that says “root”.
- Now the filesystem is in read only state, you have to remount it to get write permissions, to do that type: mount –o rw, remount /
- Now you can set any user’s password using this simple command: passwd USERNAME (replace USERNAME with the name of the account whose password you want to change)
- After entering this command you will be asked to type and retype the password, once you have done that, your password will be changed.
That is all you need to do to change the password of any user account on your Linux installation.
Stay tuned for our next article…
