Today i locked myself out of Ubuntu 11.10 with a stupid typo
The Mistake:
- Single user mode: i am the only system user and i and the admin
- Wanted to add myself to the vbox group
- My supplementary groups were “admin” which is the Ubuntu default for superusers
- typed the command usermod -G vboxsf naveen ( missed the -a Flag )
- The correct command must have been usermod -aG vboxsf naveen (the -a appends )
- Without the -a flag, my supplementary group got overwritten as vboxsf – and now i dont have admin privileges – duh!!
The recovery:
- Reboot into Ubuntu
- Press and Hold the “Shift” button to access the GRUB
- From the GRUB select Recover Mode
- You should see a window with 4 options (resume, fsck, remount, root)
- Select remount – it will remount the file system as read write
- The file system during recovery mode will typically be mounted as read-only – so you cannot modify anything if you dont do the above step
- Next select root: Drop to root shell prompt, it will drop you into the root command prompt
- Now you are root and can do anything
- I fixed my error with usermod -aG admin naveen ( no typos this time ! )
- Exit-Reboot and you are fine !!
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