How To Reset Root Password In Fedora 35

Have you forgotten the root password in Fedora? Or do you want to change the root user password in your Fedora system? No problem! This brief guide walks you through the steps to change or reset root password in Fedora operating systems.

Step 1 - Switch on your Fedora system and press ESC key until you see the GRUB boot menu. Once the GRUB menu is appeared, choose the Kernel you want to boot and hit e to edit the selected boot entry.

Step 2 - In the next screen, you will see all boot parameters. Find the parameter named ro.

Step 3 - Replace the 'ro' parameter with 'rw init=/sysroot/bin/sh'(without quotes, of course). Please mind the space between "rw" and "init=/sysroot...". After modifying it, the kernel parameter line should look like below.

Step 4 - After changing the parameters as shown above, press Ctrl+x to enter into the emergency mode i.e. single user mode.

From the emergency mode, enter the following command to mount root (/) file system in read/write mode.

chroot /sysroot/

Step 5 - Now change the root password with passwd command:

passwd root

Enter the root password twice. I suggest you to use a strong password.

Step 6 - After resetting the root password, run the following command to enable SELinux relabeling on reboot :

touch /.autorelabel

Step 7 - Finally, exit the single user mode and reboot the Fedora system to normal mode by running the following command:

exit

reboot

Wait for SELinux relabeling process to complete. It will take a few minutes depending upon the filesystem's size and speed of your hard drive.

Step 8 - After the filesystem relabeling is completed, you can log in to your Fedora system with new root password.

As you can see, the steps to reset root password in Fedora 35 is fairly easy and exactly same as resetting root password in RHEL and its clones like CentOS, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.