Recover Root Password in RHEL6

There are a lot of guide lines on recovering ROOT password in a Red Hat or Fedora, by entering single user mode and change the ROOT password using passwd command. However the trick isn’t work in RHEL 6 any more, where issuing the passwd command in single user mode will not prompt you to enter the new password.

Here is a trick where I discover in order to recover the ROOT password in RHEL6.

1. First enter single user mode. To do this, boot your machine and wait until the message to enter GRUB (the one with a counter). Press any key to enter GRUB, then press e to edit the boot argument. Just append the word single at the back of the arguments and press enter to continue boot.
2. You should enter single user mode, with the root prompt. Instead of using entering only passwd, enter the following command:passwd -d root
3. “-d” is meant for making the password blank. Now your root password should be blank. Reboot your machine and change your ROOT password.

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