How to Reset Admin Password on Ubuntu 14.10

When you install Ubuntu on your system. The first user you have created get administrative privileges along with root account. You can also create administrative user latest installation of Ubuntu using main account.

In some case if you lost your administrative account access on Ubuntu, you can reset it within 2 minutes. I am running Ubuntu 14.10 on Virtual Box. Follow below steps to reset password.

• 1. Restart you Ubuntu system.
• 2. On Grub loading screen press ESC to view list.
• 3. Now select “Advanced options for Ubuntu” and press enter.

4. Now select following (recovery mod) option and press enter.

5. Here you will see Recovery menu. Select “Drop to root shell prompt”.

• 6. Change password of your administrative user. For this example, I am changing password of user “root”

   root@ubuntu:~# passwd root
  

7. In case you get error like below.

passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

remount your file system in read/write mode using following command and try reset password again.

root@ubuntu:~# mount -o remount,rw /