Greg Wooledge <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 12:41:30 +0100, Chris Green wrote: > > Cannot open access to cosole, the root account is locked > > See sulogin(8) man page for more details > > Does the system have a root password, or did you leave that blank > during installation, and have been administering it entirely with > sudo the whole time? > Yes, fairly standard I think (though I will maybe reconsider now).
> Unfortunately, if you leave the root password blank, there is no way > to enter single-user mode during boot -- because you must supply the > root password to do that. A lot of people are not aware of this, > because it's so rarely needed. > > Instead of booting into single-user mode, you can try booting directly > into a root shell (init=/bin/bash and so on). You should search the > web for full instructions on how to do that, because there are a few > steps involved. > > If you ever do get the system back to a working state (defined as having > the root file system mounted read-write), you should consider setting a > root password at that time, so that single-user mode will work. Simply booting from a Debian 13 USB stick allowed me to fix the fstab entry and the system boots OK now. I will probably add a root login. :-) -- Chris Green ยท
