Recovery
System security is very important, however there are time that a system becomes so secure that the owner of the system becomes locked out of their own computer. There are a couple different methods for recovering a locked system.
1 - Issues
1.1 Issues resulting in a locked system
There are many things which may lock someone out of their system. The most notable ones are:
- Forgotten root password
- Problematic PAM configuration
There are two methods for recovering a system locked out by these issues, one of which should be set up by default.
2 - Rescue Partition
2.1 Introduction
Everest includes a small rescue partition in its system images, which contains only what is necessary to recover a system. Using this partition, system recovery is a relatively easy task.
2.2 Booting
While installing, either GRUB automatically created a boot entry for the rescue partition, or you did it yourself. If not, the rescue partition is unusable for recovery.
To boot into the rescue partition, power off your system, and select
3 - Using BASH as init
3.1 Introduction
The Linux kernel supports setting a custom init using kernel parameters. In this instance, we will use
3.2 Booting
Power off your system. While booting, edit your boot entry's kernel parameters. On GRUB, this can be done with the
Add the following to your kernel parameters:
init="/bin/bash"