Fedora System Maintenance root password not working

Question

When I was running a program on my Fedora machine, my system froze and I had to do a hard reboot. But once I rebooted, Fedora complained that the file system has errors and attempted to fix it.

Now, it gives me a screen where it prompts me to enter the root password for maintenance or press ctrl+d for reboot. But the root password which I had on my system does not work anymore. I have a ton of configurations/settings on the machine which I do not want to lose.

Am I missing something really simple ?

Answer 1

You can always boot from a rescue CD and then blank the root password. Alternatively, use GRUB to boot into runlevel 1 and you should be able to get a shell prompt without entering any password. You can then use the passwd command to change the password.