RHEL8 change root password now it hangs at boot

Hi all

I am studying the RHCSA and practicing changing root password.

I got an RHEL8 VM on vmware workstation on win10.

So I reboot my vm, insert rd.break into grub, mounts the sysroot, chroot into sysroot, and passwd the new root password, and it all seems to be going fine. I got the successful password token updated message.

then I exit out the shell and reboot on the cmd line, and the VM seems to hang at the screenshot I have attached.

It is a brand new VM, I haven't done anything special to it, everything is the factory default. no selinux. and when I try to ssh into it with my user id (not the root one) it always says my password is wrong (though I think this might be more because my vm isn't fully started yet).

Even a reboot of the vm (from vmware) doesn't work, it just hangs at a different place.

I don't understand why this is happening.