Resetting password on Raspberry PI (newer images)

Makerspace Areas Electronics
1

The newer images for raspberry pi use PARTUUIDs in the root filesystem options so most of the online “How to reset the password on your pi” tutorials are missing a couple of steps to make it work. I helped @Gary with this today and thought I’d type it up here for posterity

  1. Stick the SD card in a windows machine and open up cmdline.txt in an editor.

  2. ADD the following to the end of cmdline.txt:
    init=/bin/sh

  3. Look for root=PARTUUID= in the command, replace it with
    root=/dev/mmcblk0p2

  4. Save cmdline.txt and stick it back in a PI

  5. Boot the PI.

  6. When the text stops scrolling by press Enter a few times to get to a # prompt

  7. Mount the proc filesystem:
    mount -t proc /proc Enter

  8. Remount the root file system as readwrite (it is mounted readonly now):
    mount -o remount,rw -t ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2 / Enter

  9. Reset the pi user’s password (or any other user, just replace pi with the user you want to reset):
    passwd pi Enter

  10. Follow the prompts to reset the password. You should see password updated successfully

  11. Sync the filesystem to disk:
    sync Enter

  12. Exit the shell
    exit Enter

  13. Once all the scrolling stops, power off the pi and remove the SD card (Note, you’ll see something about a kernel panic, ignore that)

  14. Stick the SD card back in a PC and edit cmdline.txt again.

  15. REMOVE init=/bin/sh from the end of the command

  16. You can change the root= option back to what it was, but you don’t need to.

  17. Save, stick the SD back in a PI and give logging in a go.