[solved] How do I start in recovery mode - need to reset sudo password

[JohnQPublic]

I've installed  Armbian again. Initially I logged in as root and 1234 password which worked. Then it asked to change the password. Something wen't wrong with it. My OrangePi PC boots fine and ok. When I open a terminal and try to do a "sudo this that" it asks my password and won't accept the one I gave, nor 1234. I've done the full installation a couple of times and same problem persists.  How do I rest root password?

The problem is that everytime I re-install everything and I'me at the very firts log (where I enter root and 1234) the screen scrolls so that I cannot see what it is asking since my monitor is 1600x1024. That I why I need to reset password afterwards. I' the only user.

Edited October 27, 2017 by JohnQPublic
solved

[guidol]

Hmmm. something that I did on some distributions:

Normally after the root password you would been forwarded to create a normal user (mine is guido  ) and this should get sudo rights.

 

So try to login as your user (not root) and do a

sudo passwd

then armbian should ask for the user password and not the root-password....after the user-password you have to enter 2 times the new root-password.

 

And for the first time try to enter a password which hasnt chars like y or z (different keyboard-layout before dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration)

A easy one is 'Joshua'

 

If that works you could try to use a password which is more secure

[arox]

Well, last time I installed ubuntu, something also went wrong : bad keyboard configuration. So, how stupid to ask a password when you are nor sure of the keyboard configured and when some obscure mechanisms can change it any time ? I found myself in the same situation as you.

 

Another trick is that the installation procedure ask to enter old password, which is unusual for root password and a source of errors.

 

So if you are not using a qwerty keyboard, you could try to enter what would be your password if your keyboard were qwerty. If you want to reset (suppress) root password (and really understand what I describe here), you can mount the sdcard first partition on another system on /mnt, then edit /mnt/etc/passwd file and remove second field of first line (that is to say leave "root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash").

[tkaiser]

4 hours ago, JohnQPublic said:

I've done the full installation a couple of times and same problem persists

Check your SD card and dmesg for 'read-only' messages. Man, this gets so booooooooring.

[JohnQPublic]

Ah, I found a solution. I reformatted the sd card again and instead of using the display I used putty to first enter everything including h3disp settings that enable me to see what is going on and what it is asking. Thinking back I now recall that that was what I did a year ago when facing the same problem .