Reset Your Ubuntu Password from the Live CD

Posted Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Resetting the Password

You'll want to boot from your Ubuntu Live CD, choosing "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer" from the boot menu.

Once the system boots, open up a new Terminal window from Applications \ Accessories and then type in the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

This command is used to tell what device name the hard drive is using, which in most cases should be /dev/sda1, but could be different on your system.

Now you'll need to create a directory to mount the hard drive on. Since we're actually booting off the live cd, the directory doesn't really get created anywhere.

sudo mkdir /media/sda1

The next command will mount the hard drive in the /media/sda1 folder.
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
Now it's time for the command that actually does the magic: chroot. This command is used to open up a shell with a different root directory than the current shell is using, and we'll pass in the folder where we mounted the hard drive.

sudo chroot /media/sda1

Now you should be able to use the passwd command to change your user account's password, and it will be applied to the hard drive since we are using chroot.

passwd geek