How To Break/Crack ROOT Password In UBUNTU With CD (LIVE OS)?

3 min readJun 29, 2021

Originally published at https://kapendra.com.

In the Previous Article, we learned to reset and crack passwords by using the recovery mode present on the OS itself. I this article we will do it using Live OS CD as an External device.

Here again, it’s really bad to lose or forget a password and you are locked out of your system. So here is the second method to reset it with the help of a Ubuntu LIVE OS. If you don’t have Live OS of Ubuntu please read our article How to break Ubuntu root password without CD (Recovery Mode)

By the end of this article, we’ll be able to reset the root password of UBUNTU and we will create our new password.

Step 1: Boot With Live OS

In this method, you need to insert a Ubuntu OS CD into the system and select the option and boot as LIVE OS. After finishing boot you will get the same environment as running a Ubuntu installed on this system.

Step 2: Get The Terminal

Now open the terminal of the system and from here we will do our task of finding disk on the system.

Step 3: Find Disk and Mount

Now the first task is to figure out the primary HDD for this run the following command

#sudo fdisk-l

This Command will ll the HDD attached to the system and also list all the present partitions. As we know our OS is in /dev/sda1(Most of the Time). so mount it using the following command

#sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Step4: Cross Mount Server File System

Now, will cross mount a permanent OS file system on the live OS by using a simple shell command. This is like copying a permanent file of live OS. we will use all these files for the next step.

#for kp in dev sys run proc; do sudo mount --bind /$kp /mnt/$kp; done

Step 5: Get Root Access

Now it’s time to get root access to all the files you have mounted on /mnt n we know that /mnt now have all the files associated with the permanent OS. Type Following command to gain root access.

#sudo chroot /mnt

You can now do anything root can on the real install.

Step 6: Reset the password and reboot

Now you have root access on the /mnt and its time to change your root with the following command

#passwd
#Enter new UNIX password:
#Retype new UNIX password:
#passwd: password updated successfully