Root password

[Rashkae]

On 03/12/2012 09:31 PM, Bill Stanley wrote:
>
> One more question...  You mentioned grub but she does not dual boot. 
> Ubuntu is the only operating system on her machine.  Do I follow the 
> same steps to get to Recovery Mode?  Maybe the original installation 
> disk will help?

Actually, the steps I mentioned were assuming a single boot system.  If 
Windows (or any other OS) were installed, Grub would always display the 
boot menu and there would be no need to monkey with Shift and ESC key to 
reveal it.

Linux needs a bootloader to boot, regardless of whether or not that 
bootloader also juggles other OS's.  (Technically, that's not true, but 
for all intents and purposes, it might as well be and will suffice for 
today.)  Of the two commonly used bootloaders for Linux, LILO and GRUB, 
just about all modern distros now use GRUB or GRUB2 by default.

One of the nice things about a full working grub install with menu is 
that it makes it easy to modify the parameters that the kernels starts 
with, which is what I documented here.

However, I should point out, as all too often happens on this list, I 
foolishly re-hashed data that is already much better covered by the 
friendly Ubuntu documentation.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LostPassword

I can already see that one critically important detail I had overlooked 
in my explanation.  If you are using the init=/bin/bash method, you have 
to change the 'ro' in the kernel boot parameters to 'rw'  (You won't be 
able to change the password so long as the filesystem is mounted 
Read-Only rather than read-write.)