On 7/20/25 07:45, Andrew W Rambus wrote:
Hello , I have a Microsoft Surface 4 ; I bought at a yard sale. ,and I’m trying to turn it on , and I can’t get past the Debian login GNU/Linux 12 login & password !!Can someone please help me , open this laptop
You can make guesses, like "admin / admin", but that's likely to be unsuccessful.
If you can boot from external media, you can mount the / directory of the Surface and edit /etc/passwd (I think just remove the "X" from 'root's line, but it's been so long I'd have to double-check, and this also assumes a standard setup on the Surface).
However, I would not trust a system that I didn't either personally install, or that came from a known trusted source. I would reinstall the system from scratch.
-- Kent