Ubuntu – How to reset administrative password without the use of a “p” key.

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So I do not know my administrative password. I read up on how to reset it by clicking left shift after the BIOS page upon start up. going to the recovery option, then root, then doing mount -o rw, remount / but then I believe I must do passwrd to change the password, HOWEVER, my keyboard does not have a working "p" key.

Does any one know of an alternative way to reset the administrative password without the use of a 'p' key? If not, does anybody know of a clever way to utilize the letter 'p' in the command prompt without a working key?

Or perhaps anyone might know how to find out your password without having to change it at all? Thank you for your time.

Best Answer

$'\x70'asswd

will mean passwd in bash, because $'x70' means p. See here for more info on this feature.

ASCII table here or in man ascii, you need the hex value for the character, for p it is 70 so you produce it with $'x70' .

Or if you already installed zsh and have turned on the interactive menu completion then from a zsh shell you can cd /usr/bin/. And then type ./ and press TAB and keep it pressing/pressed until the interactive menu completion kicks in and then just select passwd with the cursor keys.

Or if you have mc (Midnight Commander) installed you can use that to select /usr/bin/passwd and then press ENTER on it to launch it or ALT+ENTER to copy the selected filename to the command line. _{(In this case you will likely need the latter as you will have to supply the username also to the command line because you are not changing the root's password but some user's. So simply launching passwd is not want you want.)}

Or any similar interactive selection program should work, but obviously these should be already installed on your system as now you don't have access to the admin password so you can't install anything.

Or if you have only passwd in /usr/bin/ which has only one letter before asswd (on a default setup this is true) then of course you can just use bash's globbing features and simply type:

/usr/bin/?asswd

to launch passwd.

If You Can Use the Installed Ubuntu System, Even As a Non-Administrative User

If you don't already have one, write an Ubuntu live USB flash drive (on Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac OS X), or burn an Ubuntu live CD/DVD (on Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac OS X).
If you know the device name of the partition that contains your Ubuntu system's root filesystem, feel free to skip to step 5.
In your Ubuntu system (not the live CD/DVD/USB system), run this command in the Terminal:
```
mount | grep ' on / '
```
You should include the spaces before on and after /.
That command produces something like /dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) as the output. The text before on (not including the space) is the device name of the partition that contains your Ubuntu system's root filesystem. Remember it (or write it down).
Boot the computer from the live CD/DVD/USB and select Try Ubuntu without installing (not Install Ubuntu).
Open up a Terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T).
Run this command:
```
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
```
Replace /dev/sda1 with the device name of the partition containing your Ubuntu system's root filesystem, if different.

If you get an error message about how a device or partition does not exist or about an "unknown filesystem type," then you probably used the wrong device name or partition number. As explained above, your system's root partition might not be /dev/sda1.
Run this command:
```
sudo chroot /mnt
```
For the purposes of being able to reset a password, or being able to change what groups users are members of, that's all you need to do to chroot in. In particular, you do not also need to mount other filesystems like /dev, /dev/pts, /sys, and /proc. More sophisticated chrooting procedures, which allow you to fully use the system you are chrooted into--for example, to update and install software inside it--do require that, as well as additional steps after entering the chroot, but this does not.

If you run sudo chroot /mnt and you see this message, it almost always means that you mounted the wrong partition to /mnt--remember, it will not actually be /dev/sda1 on all systems--though it would also happen if you deleted /bin/bash:
```
chroot: failed to run command ‘/bin/bash’: No such file or directory
```
If that does happen, then you can unmount it with sudo umount /mnt and then proceed to mount the correct partition.
Perform one of these tasks, to obtain/restore access to the install Ubuntu system.
- If you want to reset a user's password:
```
passwd username
```
  Replace username with your username. (This is the username on the system installed on the hard drive, and not "ubuntu" which is the username of the default user on the Ubuntu Desktop Install CD.)
  
  Enter the password you want for that user.
  - If you don't know your username, you can get a list of users on the system by running:
```
ls /home
```
    This works because /home contains all the users' home directories, and the name of a user's home directory is the same as the name of the user.
- Alternatively, if you want to set/reset the root password:
  
  Since you're in a root shell, you can use the passwd command with no arguments to reset root's password:
```
passwd
```
  But please see this page, which explains why having the root account enabled is not recommended in Ubuntu.
- Alternatively, if you want to make a user an administrator (so they can perform administrative actions including running commands as root with sudo):
  
  In Ubuntu 12.04 and higher (you can run lsb_release -r to see what version of Ubuntu you have, just make sure you run it in the chroot or it will tell you what version the live CD has), run:
```
usermod -a -G sudo username
```
  In Ubuntu 11.10 and lower, administrative abilities were conferred by membership in the admin group rather than the sudo group. So then you would instead run:
```
usermod -a -G admin username
```
  In both cases, replace username with the name of the user account you want to give admin powers.
Run these three commands:
```
exit
sudo umount /mnt
exit
```
The last of those commands quits the Terminal window.
Reboot the system by clicking the power icon on the upper-right corner of the screen and clicking Shut Down. (Then click Restart in the dialog box that comes up.) Make sure to remove the CD/DVD or USB flash drive before the system boots up again, so that you can get into your Ubuntu system on the hard disk.
- If you're running an old enough Ubuntu live CD that there is a Restart option in the power menu, you should click that rather than Shut Down.

If You Cannot Use The Installed Ubuntu System At All

If you can't log on to obtain the device name of the partition that contains your Ubuntu system's root filesystem, you can figure it out after booting the live CD. There are several ways to do this. I present the one here that I consider easiest and least likely to lead to mistakes. (However, you may also be interested in this other method.)

If you don't already have one, burn an Ubuntu live CD/DVD (on Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac OS X) or write an Ubuntu live USB flash drive (on Ubuntu, Windows, or Mac OS X).
Boot the computer from the live CD/DVD/USB and select Try Ubuntu without installing (not Install Ubuntu).
Open GParted.
- To do this in Unity, which is the default desktop environment in most versions of Ubuntu, click the home button (i.e., the button at the upper-left corner of the screen with the Ubuntu logo on it) or press Super, which is also known as the Windows key. Then type in gparted. GParted will come up, and you can click it.
- Ubuntu 17.10 and later use GNOME 3 with the GNOME Shell instead of Unity. To open GParted, click on the grid of nine dots that appears on the lower-left corner of the screen to open the application panel. Then click on the GParted icon.
  
  Special thanks to Videonauth for explaining how to open GParted in GNOME 3, as well as for providing these screenshots.¹
- On very old versions of Ubuntu that use GNOME 2 instead of the Unity or Unity 2D interface, open GParted from the top menu by clicking System → Administration → GParted Partition Editor.
- Other Ubuntu flavors, like Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu and Lubuntu, have a similar system of nested menus, through which you can access GParted while running them from a live USB or live CD/DVD.
Now you can see all your partitions graphically. If you have more than one drive, you may need to select the one that contains your Ubuntu system, in the drop-down menu at the upper-right corner of GParted.
The partition that contains your Ubuntu system's root filesystem is most likely a large partition of type ext4 (or for very old Ubuntu systems, ext3). Usually there is only one ext4 (or ext3) partition, or just one big one. Otherwise, one might be the / partition (containing the root filesystem, this is what you want) and the other might be the /home partition. So if there are two large ext4 or ext3 partitions, you can assume the first one (shown farthest to the left) is probably the one that contains your system's root filesystem.

This could possibly be wrong, but nothing will be damaged by these instructions if you are. In some other situations, outside the actions described in this post, it would not necessarily be safe to make this assumption.
Remember, or write down, the device name of the partition that (probably) contains the root filesystem. GParted shows this to you. It usually takes the form /dev/sdXn where X is a lower-case letter and n is a number.
Quit GParted.
Follow the instructions above ("If You Can Log On as a Non-Administrative User"), starting with Step 6.

These post was originally adapted from post #9, which I wrote, in this Launchpad Answers question.

¹ Credit goes to Videonauth for explaining to me how to launch GParted in an Ubuntu 17.10 live environment. I don't have GNOME 3 and would not have been able to provide those instructions otherwise. He also supplied both screenshots. (All I added were the ugly hand-drawn arrow and circle.)

Ubuntu – Reset User Password on Ubuntu Terminal in Windows 10 Environment

Open the command prompt, type either ubuntu config --default-user root or lxrun /setdefaultuser root. Hit Enter.

Next, open the Linux Bash shell and it will log you as root without asking a password. So you can then use the following command to reset your forgotten user password:

passwd user_name

When done, open the command prompt and run this command:

ubuntu config --default-user user_name

This will set your Linux Bash shell to run with your regular user.

Source: https://www.top-password.com/blog/forgot-linux-bash-password-in-windows-10/

Best Answer

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