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System went to sleep, then asked for a password. I have tried every password I have ever used. Does ubuntu require something different. I loaded this two years ago, last summer. I do not remember, how do I get it back?

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Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Could you be more specific about "System went to sleep"? Did you use the suspend-to-RAM (standby) feature and is it asking for a password in the screenlock? Or do you mean you haven't used this machine for two years and you need password recovery? –  gertvdijk Jan 30 '13 at 22:09
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I would boot from a System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org) and mount your filesystem, chroot into it and then change the password.

This is done like so:

  1. Either run fdisk -l or blkid to identify which disk and partition is your root filesystem. I will assume it is /dev/sda5.

  2. Mount it with mount /dev/sda5 /mnt. Sometimes it might be necessary to specify which filesystem is used, for example mount -t ext4 /dev/sda5 /mnt.

  3. Then chroot into it, chroot /mnt. This is done so that the commands that follow is issued from within the filesystem root of your on-disk installation.

  4. Change the password with passwd chastain or any other user.

Note that there are many ways in which this procedure can go wrong. Refer to the excellent documentation at http://www.sysresccd.org/Online-Manual-EN for how to handle LVM, etc.

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