Reset Root Password

Technical Help
1

1. Create a bootable USB of Ubuntu(or any flavor of Linux)

We discuss creating a bootable USB here.

2. Boot into the live image

Power the machine on and press Del when you see the Asus logo.
Then press F8 to open the boot menu. Select your USB drive.
From here, select Try Ubuntu without Installing.

3. Mount the root partition:

lsblk(list block) lists all of the disks/drives seen by your machine.
Open up a terminal and enter lsblk to see the existing partitions.

This is a snippet from lsblk on my machine:

...
nvme0n1    259:0    0 931.5G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0  512M  0 part
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0  931G  0 part
...

Given the size of nvme0n1p2, I know it’s my root partition.
I mount it to the /mnt directory with the following:

sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt
  1. Chroot(change root) into the directory.
    In the terminal, run:
sudo chroot /mnt

5. Change your Password

Run passwd to change the root password.

Optionally run passwd <your username> to change the password for your user.

6. Syncing & Umounting the disk:

Finally, run:

exit
sudo umount /mnt
sudo sync

Remove the USB and reboot.