3/4/18

Hey All,

I lab a lot, and I mean a lot. One thing I run into is vCenter’s Appliance expiring it’s password for the root account.

At 1st this was extremely annoying and more it was frustrating until I could figure out ohwto reset the password in GRUB.

So Let me write something up to help others.

Step-by-Step:

1. right click on the VCSA appliance in the ESXi host it lives.
2. go to “edit settings and go to vm options and drill down to boot options.
3. increase the boot delay to like 8000 miliseconds or something high.
4. reboot the vCSA appliance and as soon as the Photon screen appears press “e”.
5. next you’ll come to this splash screen with coding, at the ned of the string that starts with linux type this:

   rw init=/bin/bash

6. Now press “F10”, after a few seconds the screen will load to a console line with a #:

7. type “passwd” and enter in your password twice. WRITE IT DOWN!
8. then type:

   umount /

   *NOTE* not “unmount” 😉

9. after that type:

   reboot -f

I hope this helps someone whenever they have this problem. This has worked in VMware vCSA 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5.

Have a good day. 🙂

Keywords: GRUB, vCSA password won’t reset, vCenter root password expired, can’t log into vCenter, vcenter password expired