As soon as the boot process starts, press ESC to bring up the GRUB boot prompt. You may need to turn the system off from the control panel and then back on to reach the GRUB boot prompt. You will see a GRUB boot prompt – press “e” to edit the first boot option. Find the kernel line linux16 or linuxefi or linux (Each menuentry block that represents an installed Linux kernel contains linux on 64-bit IBM POWER Series, linux16 on x86_64 BIOS-based systems, and linuxefi on UEFI-based systems. Then the initrd directives followed by the path to the kernel and the initramfs image respectively) and add init=/bin/sh at the end of the line and then press CTRL-X to boot.
System will boot and you will see the root prompt. Type mount -rw -o remount / and then passwd to change the root password and then touch /.autorelabel and then exec /sbin/init
In short:
init=/bin/sh – In case of VMWare like KVM or VirtualBox use rb.break instead of inti=/bin/sh
# mount -o remount,rw /
# passwd root
[Enter New Password]
[Re-enter New Password]
# touch /.autorelabel
# exec /sbin/init
It should look like this one:
–cut
1:
2: linux16 /vmlinuz-3.10.0-229.7.2.e17.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/centos-root ro rd.lvm.lv=centos/root rd.lvm.lv=centos/swap crashkernel=auto rhgb quiet LANG=en_IE.UTF-8 systemd.debug init=/bin/sh
3: initrd16 /initramfs-3.10-0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64.img
4:
–cut