Hi,

I remember back in the days, there was a neat trick to recover a lost root password, or more exactly, redefine a new password for root.

1. In the bootloader, boot the system with the ‘init=/bin/bash’ kernel argument.

2. Remount the root partition in read-write mode:

# mount -o remount,rw /

3. Set the password for root:

# passwd

4. Remount the root partition in read-only mode:

# mount -o remount,ro /

5. Switch off the computer.

I tried this out of curiosity on a CentOS 7 sandbox machine, and this doesn’t seem to work anymore. I can boot to a ‘bash’ console and set the password OK. But this password doesn’t seem to work on the subsequent normal boot.

Anybody knows why this is so?

Cheers,

Niki

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