Boot CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 Server in Single User Mode or root password reset

Using “rd.break” keyword

Reboot Your CentOS 8 or RHEL 8 Server and go to grub boot loader screen by interrupting auto boot and choose first line which includes the kernel (In case you have multiple kernel lines choose the appropriate one which suits to your environment). Below is the CentOS 8 boot loader screen,

Press ‘e’ to enter in the edit mode and then go to the end of line which starts with ‘linux‘ word, type the keyword “rd.break”

now press Ctrl-x to boot system in single user mode then we will get below screen,

Remount the /sysroot in read-write (rw) mode

Run the following commands to mount sysroot file system in rw,

switch_root:/# mount -o remount,rw /sysroot
switch_root:/# chroot /sysroot
sh-4.4#

As we can see above that we got ‘sh’ shell prompt, now root user can execute the commands.

Let’s assume we want to recover root password by resetting it, so execute following commands one after the another

sh-4.4# echo “P@ssW0rD@123#” | passwd --stdin root 
sh-4.4# touch /.autorelabel

Once you are done with password reset, run below command to reboot your system

sh-4.4# reboot -f