[ SOLVED ] Sudo and sudoers

[Monkepats]

I'm answering my own post.  After thinking on it a little, the fix was easy.
I booted from the usb drive in safe mode, mounted the primary filesystem and edited the file
as "root". Thank you for your patience, Been using Mint for a few years and never ran into
this problem before.  we live to learn.

[Monkepats]

I am an out of practice Unix IT. Using Linux Lite 5. Wanted to change my users name, which I did through the terminal and vi. changed it in passwd and shadow, forgot to manually add a root password and to edit the sudoers file. now I can log in as myself, but I can not SU or SUDO. how can I get root access to either add my login to sudoers file or login as root at the "Alt F2" login. In the shadow file root has an "!" in the passwd file/

what can I do? can anybody help me?