Can't get to the GRUB menu when booting my A04 devterm. Is there even a GRUB menu?

DevTerm
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It’s been about a year since I booted my devterm, and I’ve apparently forgotten whatever clever password I set. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to reset the root password. Unfortunately I don’t remember what version of the OS it’s running.

Help a brother out?

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reset by editing /etc/shadow on microsd card. there is no grub.

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@pkr , thanks for the fast reply! That’s great info, and I’ll give it a try and report back. :sign_of_the_horns:

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Okay, I realized it would’ve been more helpful if I had set up my context in the initial post.

  • My main computer is a Mac running the latest OS, which wouldn’t read the sd card, I’m guessing because it’s a Linux file system. Same thing when I tried it with a Windows box.
  • I then tried to see if I could access the sd card on the Max through the terminal somehow, but couldn’t get that to work, either.

So, I’m stalled out again. I mean, I don’t have anything I’d miss on the devterm, and not opposed to reflashing the system. I’d just prefer to not do that if possible. Plus it’d be a good learning experience to get into the file system and edit some stuff. :smile:

Thanks in advance,

Aa.

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You should be able to access the SD on a Mac, I don’t have any but it should read it.
You can always just use a live Linux distro to look at your SD card.

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Yeah, I thought so too, but I’m obviously missing something.

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The relevant partition on the card is most likely ext4/ext3, so the simplest way would be to mount it from a Linux system.

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That makes sense to me, though I unfortunately don’t currently have another machine with a Linux system. Which is making me think I should probably just reformat the sd card and flash the newest image.

Though there must be a way to start up my Mac at the command line, and get into the sd from there…

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you can run ubuntu live in virtual box and mount sd card there

seems possible: How to access an SD card from a virtual machine? - Super User

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or…

you can get another sd card, flash there a fresh system and then modify old one via some usb card reader

devterm is a linux machine after all :slight_smile:

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Hah! That would be pleasingly recursive! :sign_of_the_horns:

I’m gonna try the virtual machine first. That had crossed my mind, but when I googled around, I wasn’t grokking it.

And I may as well implement the second suggestion, too. Why not? :slight_smile:

I’ll report back, and thanks to everyone who’s offered their time and expertise to a seminoob!

Aa.

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