2

I am unable to login again after rebooting my laptop which runs Ubuntu 14.04. I am 100% sure the password I type is correct ( see below - I also ruled out a keyboard issue) so it's not the case that I have forgotten it and would need to reset it.

I have both Unity and KDE but it doesn't work with either of them.

I looked at various suggestions like:

  • typing my password in the login field to make sure this is not a keyboard issue
  • open a tty. My password still doesn't get recognized at the prompt so I can't go any further.
  • boot to GRUB and open a root terminal but I don't have the root password on my machine so it didn't take me very far. I have also found it very hard to boot into GRUB as holding SHIFT while booting has worked a few times only and I can't get it to work anymore.

Also, not sure this is relevant but from the unity/kde login screen I am unable to connect to wireless (I get a permission error)

What should I try next?

Zanna
  • 72,312
marie
  • 21

1 Answers1

1

If you are 1000% certain that you are typing the correct password and if you are 1000% certain that your keyboard is not the problem, the only other explanation that seems logical is that the password in /etc/passwd is indeed not the password you are entering at login.

I've done this a few times in the past myself: trying to log in to the wrong machine.... in your case, perhaps you are booting a different OS than the one you think you are.

If you are 1000% certain that the above is not the case, you'll need to boot from LiveCD and change the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file pair or encrypted password for your account. Alternately, you can run John the Ripper against /etc/shadow to see if the password there matches what you are using to login.

I'm assuming that your laptop only has one account. Looking to the future, it's always a good idea to have at least a backup guest account on any system as a possible back door in case you get locked out of your main account.

Another possibility would be if you have ssh running on your laptop. From another machine in your LAN you could figure out what IP is assigned to your laptop and then ssh in that way. Of course this won't help if your passwd file is corrupted or not the same as the OS instance you want to log into.

jones0610
  • 2,514