This may permanently damage your Chrome OS installation, or cause problems in future. Proceed with caution and take a backup.
Sometime after updating Chrome OS, some options in settings may get locked out with the label "This setting is managed by the device owner". If you have root access, continue with the guide. If not and you are dual booting, check out Force developer mode on Chrome OS to see how to edit the shadow
file to get root access.
- Open crosh (Alt+Ctrl+T). Type
shell
. A new green colouredchronos
prompt appears. Typesudo su
to get into red colouredroot
shell. Enter password if necessary. Alternately you can also open tty by Ctrl+Alt+F2, login asroot
and proceed. - A basic search of the files with "owner" in their name can be done as below. This step is optional, but good to know. It may take a long time. You may jump to the next step without performing this step.
cd / find . -type f -iname "*owner*" ! -path "./media/*" ! -path "./run/arc/media/*" ! -path "*android*" 2> /dev/null
- The list should have the file:
./mnt/stateful_partition/encrypted/var/lib/whitelist/owner.key
. Go to the file location.cd /mnt/stateful_partition/encrypted/var/lib/whitelist/
- Doing an
ls
command lists all the files, including some policy related files. We do not need any of them. Move all of them to any directory. Here we are already logged in asroot
(in red prompt) and we will move them in the root user's home, under apolicy_backup
directory. This is just for backup of these files.mkdir ~/policy_backup mv * ~/policy_backup/
- Proceed with a reboot. Enter:
reboot
After rebooting, new policy files in the above directory should regenerate. Now all the previously locked options in settings should get unlocked.