I recently gave my laptop to someone who seriously needed one but I don't know how to assign their name and password to the computer, it is still under my name and password and still has all my old information and I wonder, is there any way I could revert it to a factory mode of a sort?
My laptop is a 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04.
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1You should be aware of the fact that it is practically always possible to recover at least part of your data. That means that if you have really sensitive information on the drive, you should replace it, or at least overwrite it several times.– Jacob VlijmDec 27, 2014 at 21:44
2 Answers
You mean just add a new user, then delete your old user & home?
There's probably a "users" GUI application that can add a new user, or just log in with your old user, and in a terminal do a
sudo adduser newusername
- May need to add the new user to a sudo group, &/or edit
/etc/sudoers
or a file in/etc/sudoers.d/
to allow the new user to usesudo
. (Could just change instances of yourolduser into newuser...)- Or this should work:
sudo adduser <username> sudo
[ How can I add a new user as sudoer using the command line? ]
- Or this should work:
- And probably add groups (change user permissions in the old Users & Groups GUI) to allow accessing external storage, printers, access logs, etc... looking in
/etc/group
should tell you what groups your old user's in, or rungrep olduser /etc/group
then similar to abovesudo adduser <username> <group>
For some GUI instructions, see these Q's
Then once the new user is up & running, remove your old user & home files. No reinstall required (unless you wanted to securely wipe the disk, or going to install a newer version anyway...)
As far as I know, there is no option to factory reset Ubuntu.
You can simply reinstall Ubuntu 14.04 over top of the current installation, if you aren't terribly worried about data security. The data will be overwritten, so unless your friend really really wants your data, they won't be able to access it.
Just get the laptop, boot up the LiveDVD/LiveUSB you used to previously install Ubuntu and reinstall - setting up their choice of username and password! It won't take terribly long (depending on whether you use a LiveUSB or LiveDVD and the internet connection speed) and is probably the easiest choice for resetting to factory defaults.
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Technically you could just delete all partitions and give them an empty disk. With an Ubuntu dvd if they want that since they will want their our admin account anyways.– RinzwindDec 27, 2014 at 16:44