Debian: get around maintenance shell asking for root password

Once in a while it might happen to you that you attempt to boot some Debian machine and some fsck errors occur. Debian will then present you a maintenance shell and ask for your root password. There are two options at this point: Enter your root password or hit CTRL-D to continue. Continuing will not resolve the problem as the fsck error needs to be fixed manually. If you don’t know your root password or you’re just to lazy to type in a 30 character string the following might help.

Enter the GRUB boot menu and edit your normal startup entry. Simply attach

init=/bin/bash

to the kernel line and hit CTRL-X to boot. This will drop you to a root shell where you can then run fsck and hopefully fix your disk.