Working Without a Password

You should not need a customer's username and password to do most of the work in Tech Support.

1. start the computer booting up, and hold down the right shift key.
2. After a few (or 10 or 20) seconds you will see the grub menu, which is characterized by a lines that will say ...kernel 2.6...
3. Hit the down arrow once to get to a line that ends with recovery mode and press enter.
4. This will bring up a menu with many options. The two that you're looking for are netroot and root. Netroot will set up networking on the machine, and then drop you to a root shell. root will just drop you to a root shell without any further setup.
5. Type startx and you will be logged into a desktop environment.

N.B. You should not use this to reset a user's password, unless absolutely necessary and never for routine work. The rootshell gives you all the privileges you need. If you need to test something in an ordinary users environment create a new user then delete it when you have finished.