ArsGeek

Say you have a grub password to keep nefarious evil-doers from modifying your er… grubs. Then say a few months go by and you decide to modify some stuff but you’ve forgotten your password.

What do you do? Well, you can try this.

First, open up a Command Line Interface terminal (CLI) and type:

grub

Now you’re in grub. let’s create a new password.

md5crypt

You’ll be asked to enter a password. Do so now.

Then md5crypt will spit out a series of characters at you. That’s your encrypted password. It will probably look something like 3dRdd8i$82kJLKJ232K8/jKj3. You want to copy that line by highlighting it, right clicking and choosing copy.

Now quit grub by typing:

quit

Now we’re going to make a backup of your menu.lst file, the config file that tells grub what’s what.

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grup/menu.lst.bak

Let’s edit the menu.lst file now and add in the new encrypted password where the old encrypted password used to be.

gksudo gedit /boot/grup/menu.lst

Find the line that looks like this:

password –md5 (a bunch of crazy characters here)

That’s your old encrypted password. You’re going to paste your new encrypted password over it by highlighting the old one, right clicking and choosing paste.

Save your file and you can now use your new grub password to access grub.