RHEL7 password recovery turned screen black upon reboot

This is with RHEL7.1 (Maipo).

I've had a few VMs where I've had to recover the Root passwd and upon rebooting, I would get the text output for sometime and then just a black screen. Systemd is set to graphical.target.

I would have to go back in and recover the Root passwd again and then it would correctly boot into the GUI so that I could log in.

Has anyone else experienced this?

thanks