I don’t want to be a nuisance but I don’t want to use more vacation time tomorrow and I’m not sure what to do from this step. I can enter the GRUB commandline, is that where I should input the above command? As soon as I select manjaro from GRUB all my peripherals get locked and the screens are black so I can’t log in as root
I tried to boot to a USB with manjaro on it, and it successfully loads to the desktop environment, but when I run sudo usermod -U $USERNAME with the appropriate username it says “usermod: user ‘$USERNAME’ does not exist”
which makes sense because the terminal session is manjaro@manjaro rather than $USERNAME@$machine but again this suggests to me that I have no way of entering the locked manjaro partition
Hi @blp92 
- $USERNAME is a placeholder for your current username.
-
sudo usermod -U $USERNAMEunlocks the user, but you need boot the local system, that is not possible on a live boot (even if chrooting). - TTY means, type: CTRL+ALT+F3 to switch to another TTY, then login and unlock the user with that command.
Hope that make it more clear.
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Thanks for the response.
1 and 2 I understood, and that’s why I was confused about the method and didn’t think it would work. 3 is new to me but does not work unfortunately.
Maybe I’m not being clear but once I have selected manjaro linux in GRUB, my peripherals all go black and are no interactive at all. Pressing CTRL+ALT+F3 yields nothing. I need to somehow unlock it from GRUB since as soon as manjaro is selected I am completely cut out from any interaction with my peripherals
The wrong password don’t lock everything - it only block login after 5 attempts - blocking for 10 minutes.
This could be a case of initrd not containing the needed modules or not able to autodetect the needed modules - but I am 99% sure it has nothing to do with the password.
When you are in GRUB menu edit the grub command line pressing e on the default entry.
Then use ↓ to reach line containing quiet the press End add a space to the end of the line and the digit 3 then press F10 to continue booting.
This should bring you to the console (runlevel 3 in the old days) - login using root credentials.
I suggest you run a full system sync using pacman
# pacman -Syyu
Then unlock the locked username - exit - and reboot.
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I trust your expertise in this but I had a manjaro install working perfectly until I entered the password wrong twice and rebooted to windows to make a last minute meeting. Ever since I’ve been stuck in this state.
If it’s not password related that’s all well and good I’d just like to resolve it somehow 
Following this, there was already a 3 at the end of that line. I tried what you suggested anyways and I still end with the locked peripherals and not a console unfortunately. Let me post a cell phone picture of what I see from the GRUB editor
That 3 is probably the kernel argument
... udev.log_priority=3
Just add a space and another digit 3 like this (without the dots - they designate whatever is present beforhand)
... udev.log_priority=3 3You are right it does have udev.log_priority=3 and I did add it to become udev.log_priority=3 3 and still got the locked screens and keyboard and mouse.
I don’t know is wrong but this needs an USB stick with a Manjaro ISO to boot the system from.
I am pretty occupied so I have to leave … Sorry I can’t followup on this.
I tried that and I successfully boot to the media but then I’m in a session on the media and I can’t do the usermod command as the username will be unrecognized
understood, thanks for your help!
Use chroot.
Locate your root device /dev/sdyX replace with your device
lsblk
Then mount the device on /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdxY /mnt
Then chroot
manjaro-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Then you can use usermod to unlock - and you should also be able to run a full sync as mentioned above.
Was successfully able to run this, thank you! Do I need to close anything in the terminal or unmount before I close this session from media?
I used this method and it seemed to work (no error was thrown at any point) and yet the issue persists. My root is in nvme0n1p7 and so I did
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p7 /mnt
followed by
manjaro-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
and once that was going I input
usermod -U $USERNAME (with correct username filled in) and it seemed to work as no error was thrown. But after rebooting and selecting manjaro again I get the same behavior as before
I aslo now am unable to boot into the media I have no idea how this happened. I’m not an idiot and I don’t think I’m inept but it seems like evidence to the contrary is mounting…I just want to get back to my manjaro distro and get some work done 
For what it’s worth I did nmap from my laptop and it doesn’t appear the desktop has an active IP address when it’s in the post GRUB but pre log-in screen lock
sigh I’m gonna have to nuke it and start from scratch aren’t I?