Reset your password in Linux
If you forget your password to your Linux server, you can easily reset it by booting your server into single-user mode.
To reset your password, you first need to restart your server to single-user mode.
First, make sure you have a console open. If it's a virtual machine, open a console from the VM's Actions menu. Or, if it's a dedicated server, open the IPMI console.
Then restart your server by clicking Reboot in the Actions menu if it's a virtual machine, or by using IPMI if it's a dedicated server (Power Control → Software shutdown, and then Power Control → Set power on).
As soon as the menu with the Linux kernels appears in Grub, press e on the keyboard.
This opens an editor. Here, add init=/bin/bash at the end of the line that contains something like linux /boot/vmlinuz and ro.
After adding the text, press Ctrl-x to boot the server. You will then be logged in as root in single-user mode without a password.
The disk is currently mounted in read-only mode. You need to start by remounting the disk in read-write mode to make changes. This is done using the following command:
You can now change a user's password. Here, we change the password for the user glesys using the passwd command:
Type the new password at the prompts:
Finally, to be on the safe side, execute the sync command to make sure the changes have been written to disk:
If the server is running AlmaLinux or Fedora, you need to execute the following command now, before booting the server normally:
Finish by booting the server normally by executing the following command:
The server will now boot into multi-user mode, and you can log in to the console using the password you just set.
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