wont let me type anything for root password

As I mentioned before, the characters you typed in the Terminal does not echo back to you from the screen. You can't see it when typing but trust me, it's there. All you have to do is type in the password and press the Enter key when your done. Just be sure to input the corrent password.

HTH.

If you didn't setup a root account, use the username+passwd which was setup during installation.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

Thanks, but still no luck. I don't know admin password. If anyone can shed any more light on the matter i would be grateful. Thanks

You should access the root account by using your 1st user password (THIS is your PASSWORD), can you do the following commands on your Terminal:

sudo -i

Then input your own password. If possible, kindly paste the output on your next reply.

HTH.

Its just says yvonne is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

Yvonne was the person i bought the laptop from.

Don't know if this will help but when i get the Terminal up it reads:

Yvonne@rosee-laptop:$

sudo -i

will give a root prompt. What are you trying to achieve exactly?

Can you copy and paste here whatever outputs when you issue the command below from your Terminal:

awk -F":" '{ print "username: " $1 "\t\tuid:" $3 }' /etc/passwd

I am trying to find the password so i can perform administrative tasks.

>

hi..
what happens is...
" yvonne is not in the sudoers file"
means that ivonne is a normal user and has no chance to do admin tasks...
u can start with a live CD/USB and change manually the "passwd" file ... or u can install again (i would do that if i were you so u can configure it urself) and put ur own user...

ok then hold shift at boot, select recovery mode, select root. You can now run:

usermod -a -G admin yvonne

Then run:

reboot

and you can now use sudo.