Ubuntu

cannot log in

Asked by advent24

My nephew (not wanting to wait for an answer to the previous question) kept messing with the system and now cannot log in at all under any user. on the sign-in screen, it tells him the user name & password are not correct. He apparently managed to delete my niece's user but somehow messed his up and when he rebooted, he is not locked out completely. We do not have the ability yet to hook up a cd rom drive & it will be a couple of weeks before it comes in so that he could at least just re-install. Any ideas on how to get around this? It is a Dell mini-laptop with Ubunto 8.10 I believe. Thank you for your help on this.

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Alexander Krivács Schrøder
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advent24 (advent24) said : 		#1

My nephew said when he would re-boot & start up before, this screen did not come up asking for the login on start-up. Not sure if this helps find the answer to his problem. Also, cannot find a way to get a command line at all... only thing we can do is get to the boot-menu screens when we first turn it on.

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Best Alexander Krivács Schrøder (alexschrod) said : 		#2

Ubuntu (or, in particular, GDM) was probably set to automatically log into your niece's account, and thus it would not show the login screen. Now, however, since her account has been deleted, it cannot log her in anymore, and will therefore ask for a username and password.

One way to get to a command line, although it will still require a username and password, which will probably not get you anywhere, is to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F6. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7 will resume the graphical session.

Your last resort, is to enter recovery mode. During bootup, you'll see a message that requests you to press ESC to enter the boot menu. Enter this menu, then choose the second-highest choice (It should end with "(recovery mode)" or something of the sort. Choose that, then wait until you get the "Recovery Menu". At this menu, you can choose "root - Drop to root shell prompt". At this point, you are logged in as root, and can fix your nephew's password by doing the command "passwd <username>". It'll ask for a password twice, enter whatever you want as password, then type "reboot" to have the computer restart. At this point, the computer should let you log in with your newly chosen password. I hope that helps.

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advent24 (advent24) said : 		#3

Thank you... He told me this morning he had fixed the problem. We'll see if he still needs to do any of this since I'm not sure what all he has done at this point. Thank you for your help.

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advent24 (advent24) said : 		#4

Thanks Alexander Krivács Schrøder, that solved my question.