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I recently bought a used Toshiba ac100, with lubuntu 12.10 preinstalled. The problem is that the previous owner has lost the password, so I am unable to connect to WiFi, change user etc.

I have read the password recovery tips, and stumbled upon another problem: the shift key doesn't bring up recovery mode options at startup. I tried pressing it repeatedly, holding it at different times, but with no result.

It just goes from the Toshiba splash screen to Lubuntu at once (no dual boot). Also I am unable to edit grub from within lubuntu, since I lack the password. Live cd won't help, as this laptop has no disc drive.

Braiam
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Råmsan
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1 Answers1

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You can unhide the boot menu just configuring the GRUB files correctly. With a Live USB open the terminal, then type sudo blkid. You will get a output similar to this:

/dev/sda1: UUID="bf554a2f-a035-4c22-bca8-162def35a03c" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sda2: UUID="3962db06-3776-4f38-8ab9-eab6feeccc1d" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb3: UUID="75a0854b-8b6b-453f-8aec-2a081a1f19e3" TYPE="swap"

Here you can see that my Hard Drive is in the sda and my pendrive is sdg. We are interested in sda. Now lets look at the descriptions of the partitions. We want the partitions that are ext4. In my case I have two ext4 partitions. This is because I have my /boot separated, I will take note about that, but lets assume that you don't have /boot separated for now and that your / (root) is sda1. Now we will mount sda1.

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys

Important note: This is the minimum. If you have a /boot partition (or any other) separated just mount it the same way, in my case sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot. Please take note that I used /dev/sda2, you should change it if using other mount points.

Now we will proceed to CHROOTING the partition:

sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Once in this step, use nano /etc/default/grub and made it looks like this:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vesafb.invalid=1 splash quiet"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Ignore any entry that starts with # those are comments. Now run:

update-grub

This will show you the boot menu by default.

Braiam
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