How to resolve login failure "password not recognised"

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Tips & Tricks
#1

This issue has been well documented on other sites/forums but thought I would share this issue I had with a different distribution but should still work for you if it ever happens to one of your installs.

The ‘de facto’ solution usually is to boot into advanced | recovery mode then from the recovery memory launch ‘root’ (terminal) then enter:

mount -n -o remount,rw /

then press Enter.

passwd your_username

then enter new password, shutdown and reboot.

If this does not work, and if you have Timeshift installed then boot from live DVD/memory stick and point to where the snapshots are held and see if that works. If it doesn’t try one of the following 3 options (acknowledgements to https://www.linuxslaves.com/2016/05/3-w … -loop.html? )

Method #1 Fix Ubuntu login screen loop

The first is quite simple. The file is located under the current user’s home directory. All you will have to do is change the owner of .Xauthority file.

  1. At login time, use Ctrl+Alt+F3 to switch and access the command line interface mode.

  2. Login into the shell using your username and your password. In this case, username will be your username you set when you installed Ubuntu.

  3. Once logged in, now run ls -lah to view list directory contents. Look for the line that ends with .Xauthority

    # ls -lah-rw-------  1 root root   53 Nov 29 10:19 .Xauthority

  4. You need to do chown. Type and run the following command :

    ['sudo' if not currently 'root'] chown username:username .Xauthority

    Now reboot and see if you can log in - if not:

  5. If it does not work, try renaming.

    mv .Xauthority .Xauthority.bak

Now reboot and try re-logging in.

Method #2 How to Fix Ubuntu login screen loop

  1. Run ls -ld /tmp. Check for the first 10 letters in the left: they should read exactly so: drwxrwxrwt

    # ls -ld /tmpdrwxrwxrwt 15 root root 4096 Nov 30 04:17 /tmp

  2. You may need to changing permission. Run the command below :

    sudo chmod a+wt /tmp

Method #3 How to Fix Ubuntu login screen loop

If even both did not work for you, try the last one! Please make sure you are connected to active internet. Check this out!

  1. Uninstall and reinstall Ubuntu lightdm. Run the following :

    sudo apt-get purge lightdmsudo apt-get install lightdmdpkg-reconfigure lightdm

  2. Once reconfigured, now reboot.

[I have modified the instructions as it is not clear at which point you become ‘root’ using the ‘sudo’ command - if the last element of a terminal prompt is ‘#’ then you are in the terminal as ‘root’ with elevated privileges. If the last element of the command prompt is ‘$’ you are a standard user, and not ‘root’. I have written this tutorial experiencing just this and used Method 1 which solved the issue for me in another GNU/Linux OS.

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