On May 20, 2019, at 16:42, Doug <dmcgarrett at optonline.net> wrote: > > I tried to install Centos on a partition of a Windows machine, and I screwed up. Thinking that the installation would take a while, I took a short break. When I > > came back, the install was "done" but it is now asking for a password that I never gave it. I can't get around this. I tried to reinstall from the DVD I downloaded, > > but it just comes up "password" instead of letting the DVD mount. I tried to reformat the partition (sda6) using gparted, but the section that contains the > > problem does not reformat, it remains there. The Centos version was downloaded on April 26, and it is called "CentOS-x86-64-DVD-1810.iso." It sounds like you need to figure out how to choose the next boot entry. Sadly that’s hard to give advice on without a manual. Once you are able to boot from the dvd again, select the rescue option [1] or just append “inst.rescue” to the kernel line of the dvd boot kernel options. From there you can have it mount your filesystem, where you can set a password if it’s a user password you need (or root’s). Although you might be better off just reinstalling from the booted dvd. I’m not sure why parted couldn’t delete the partition, that seems unlikely. Maybe you can give more details of what you are describing? 1. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/installation_guide/sect-rescue-mode — Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>