Raspberry Pi: Any my password is..

.. well not raspberry, and not the usual form of passwords I use, and not written down in 'Electronics Log Book'.

To be far this PiZeroW hadn't been started in a while (too long) so my own fault. [insert your preferred search] to the rescue as usual. This page was the real help; to summarise the steps then

  • take out the microSD card and connect to computer
  • Open cmdline.txt and add init=/bin/sh to the command there (this is in 'boot' that Windows or Linux will find)
  • microSD back to Pi, and boot
  • Will boot straight to the command line, if it appears to be stuck hit return a few times to confirm the prompt is there.
  • su to become root user
  • I had to make the filesystem writeable with mount -o remount,rw /dev/mmcblk0p2 /
  • passwd pi to reset the password to *********
  • shutdown -p to shutdown
  • microSD back to the computer to undo the changes to the cmdlint.txt
  • and then back to the Pi

Though I had to to put the Pi case back together as it is an acrylic layered on that promptly fell completly apart. (Extracting the microSD initially required taking the case apart slightly).