RHEL7 password recovery turned screen black upon reboot

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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

Responses

Hello, when updating the System Administrator's Guide I tested the password reset procedures many times and only remember problems related to SELinux. But I solved that and updated the procedure. Can you confirm you are following one of the procedures here Changing and Resetting the Root Password?

These are the commands that I'm running for reset the root password on RHEL7 and once I reboot, I get some text output during the bootup process (I've modified /etc/default/grub to launch with GRUB_GFMODE=text so I don't get that bar that crawls from left to right).

press "e" for the kernel that I want to edit 

find linux16 line

append rd.break to the linux16 line

press ctrl+x

mount /sysroot with the following command:  mount -oremount, rw /sysroot 

setup /sysroot as a chroot jail:  chroot /sysroot

reset the root passwd:  passwd root

unlabel files that get relabeled during the boot process:  touch ./autorelabel 

exit 

exit

After the reboot, I will get some text output for some time and then it won't boot into the GUI interface.

I did notice that the RHEL notes that you have a URL to has the following:

rd.break enforcing = 0 

However that it just to speed up the SELinux relabeling process, correct?

thanks

The use of enforcing = 0 is to allow you to complete the boot process despite having mislabeled files. No relabeling takes place as a result of that command. That has to be done later in that case and the time it takes is not influenced by the use of that command.

Hello,

I'm encountering this issue as well. First, I booted into single-user mode by adding the "single" statement in the grub loader option. Afterwards, it would boot into emergency mode but it would still prompt me for the password. So, I booted this time and added "rw init=/bin/bash" and that dropped me into a shell. I reset the password there and restarted the system. Afterwards, I see the GUI login screen pop-up for like 2 seconds with a loading wheel and the screen goes black. Nothing else happens.

When I was in the shell session, I only ran passwd and it said password reset successful. I heard that single-user mode auto mounts the file systems, so I did not run mount.

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

EDIT: This is also a VM RHEL 7 installation.

Hello, please confirm if you have read and are following the procedures in the System Administrator's Guide section Changing and Resetting the Root Password.

hi the problem i notice that would cause the black screen after boot is the autorelabel command, the syntax should be "touch /.autorelabel" with the (.) on the inside next to autorelabel and not on the outside like your trying to execute a script.

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