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.
Note: This guide has been officially tested on Fedora 36 and 35 versions. The steps provided below are same for resetting root password in Fedora Silverblue and older Fedora versions.
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 36 is fairly easy and exactly same as resetting root password in RHEL and its clones like CentOS, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.
6 comments
Hi,
Thanks a lot
Very useful article
Failed to start Switch Root.
Give root password for maintenance (or press Control-D to continue):
Help me please
What does it say when you enter the root user password?
I have the same problem.
It say:
Login incorrect.
Give root password for maintenance
(or press Control-D to continue):
Hmmm… I haven’t had this issue in my test machine. I will try with another test machine.
Another way to change the root passwd or create one when Fedora gives you the option to create one on installation is to open a terminal and enter “sudo passwd root”. You will be asked to give your sudo password and then enter the new root password, and then enter it again. I have used this on several of the latest versions of Fedora, including 36.