So I caused my system not to boot by adding a line to fstab.
Booting into recovery mode, absolutely worthless as I set a root password which I could not remember.
Finally figured out how to get back into the system and fix everything.
Btw, my distro is linux lite 3.0; an offshore and the Big brother of Ubuntu.
So what you do is you load the same live cd of your distro, in my case linux lite 3.0
Once its done loading from the cd, open a terminal and type sudo Thunar (or whatever the default file manager for your distro)
Now go to /etc/fstab and remove faulty line, you can also choose to keep the file empty (no difference).
Save the file, it will save only if you opened via sudoed File manager.
Now restart your system.
The likely scenerio is you will have no GUI, and will be required to log in, do that.
There's a few reasons why it took so long to boot and why the GUI did not load.
What has happened is that during the boot, linux has basically erased /etc/fstab , but kept a backup file for reference only.
That's the reason the boot took so long.
The reason the gui didn't load is because of the former problem results in a read only system
Let's over rule that. first determine the directly of your main drive by typing: fdisk -l
Now type: sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 (replace with your main system drive)
At this point, the GUI will probably load up, whether it does or does not matters not yet.
now type: sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Also make sure /etc/x11/default-display-manager contains /usr/sbin/lightdm (this file should only contain one entry)
That is the default entry for any Ubuntu based distro. If it was wrong, you sudo FileManager, open, edit, save.
Now we need to fix the fstab, but we cannot rely on the reference file as the reference is no longer valid.
Go to /dev/disk/by-uuid/
There should be 2 entries in most cases, look to the type in my case one is sda1 and sda5
sda1 refers to main drive, and sda5 refers to the swap
Will copy the uuid from these two devices and paste to replace in the reference file, we will then copy the reference file, sudo file manager open stab, paste and save.
Finally we will run again sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Done!
Bypass, no boot, no admin pass, no root pass
