Cannot open access console, root account is locked.

Well that’s not troubling at all.

Does your Pi hate you? Will it not start?

Did you recently mess with the fstab file? If so, the pi could be failing on a bad line, in which case there is hope!

First restart the pi and hold down shift to bring it into recovery mode.

 

Click “Edit config”.

Add “init=/bin/sh” to the cmdline.txt file. It needs to be on the same line as everything else because this file is actually just a list of arguments that get passed to the kernel on startup.

 

 

Now close out of there and exit the recovery screen. The Pi will continue to boot. When you see the following line in the console, it’s done.

random: crng init done

From here you can go ahead and remove any offending lines from the fstab file:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

The fstab file might be read only. If that’s the case, use the following command to make it editable:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /

 

Now exit out of the shell. I couldn’t get the pi to reboot on its own so I ended up pulling the plug. I know it’s not ideal but hey, at least I made it this far..

When you restart the pi, hold down shift to get back to the recovery screen. Remove the “init=/bin/sh” that was added to the cmdline.txt file earlier and exit out. That’s it! You should be in.

 

Huge thank to you the folks on the Raspberry Pi forums for the instructions:

• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=199079
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=172814
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=144139