I have happily used Peppermint 6 on my 4 Acer Aspire One for a year.
The battery is dead so I use the mains and recently we had a power cut when I was using my computer
and since then, when I log on and get to the “password” stage it keeps returning me to the password screen.
I must mention that it does not say “incorrect password”.
Is there a trick to get me in ?
Thank you, in anticipation for your assistance.
Kevin Woodward
did you try to use root account instead? and just for clarification, where do you type in your password? is it graphical interface (like GDM or lightDM etc) or in terminal - black screen and just… terminal prompt 
?
if its graphical, then i would try root account first and then check the logs for your user account or switch to the terminal and manually execute ‘startx’ command and see what is the problem.
Sometimes I inadvertently put a space in front of my username and it shows incorrect password.
The answer is to delete the username and put it in correctly!
if it happened immediately (first boot) after a powercut it sounds like file system corruption.
Have you got a LiveUSB ?
If so, boot to it and post the output from:
sudo fdisk -l