Sudo Password Not Recognized on SSD Installation - AGX Orin Ubuntu 20.04

[huseyinkilic]

Hi,

I am using an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with Ubuntu 20.04, and I installed the OS on an external SSD about 8 months ago. I have been using the same sudo password without any issues until last week. Suddenly, the system started rejecting my sudo password as incorrect, even though I haven’t changed it.

I have tried basic troubleshooting, but I haven’t found a solution yet. I would like to avoid resetting my entire setup as I have important configurations and data on the system.

Here are my questions:

1. Is there any way to resolve this sudo password issue without performing a fresh installation?
2. If I copy certain files from the eMMC installation to the SSD, could that resolve the issue? If so, which files should I consider?

Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[SivaRamaKrishnaNV]

Moved to Jetson AGX forum

[linuxdev]

It sounds like that user can still log in normally. What do you see from:
ls -l /usr/bin/sudo

I’d ask if your user is in the /etc/sudoers file, but you can’t read it without sudo.

Also, what filesystems are present? What do you see as the output from:
df -H -T | egrep -v '(tmpfs|squashfs)'

You cannot copy or overwrite many of the relevant files without sudo working. One thing you can do in a worst case is to clone the rootfs, edit the loopback mounted clone on another computer, and then flash the repaired clone (this takes a lot of time, disk space, and patience).

[huseyinkilic]

Hi,

I can still log in without any issues, as I have autologin enabled. Here are the outputs of the commands you requested:

ls -l /usr/bin/sudo
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 157632 Apr 4 2023 /usr/bin/sudo

df -H -T | egrep -v ‘(tmpfs|squashfs)’
/dev/nvme0n1p1 ext4 490G 138G 328G 30%

[linuxdev]

According to that output you should be able to use sudo. Those basics are valid.

If you are using auto login, is it possible that someone else also used auto login, and changed the password? If the account has a password, then I would expect that the password would be required to change to a new password, but since sudo itself should be valid, that so too should your password…if it has not changed.

If you monitor “dmesg --follow”, and then use a command such as “sudo whoami”, is there a dmesg log line created as a result of the sudo attempt?

Also, did you make changes to the primary boot device in that time? There might be a different password saved to NVMe versus what is on some other media.