Unable to enter password at maintenance prompt for VMWare guest

Issue

• VMware ESX hosts lost connectivity to backend disk
• When attempting to restart a RHEL 6.1 virtual machine, was presented with the following error at the console in the vSphere client:

    /dev/mapper/system-root contains a file system with errors, check foreced.
    /dev/mapper/system-root: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found.
    /dev/mapper/system-root: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.

• Recieve the following text asking to enter the root password:

  Give root password for maintenance
  (or type Control-D to continue):

• When entering the password, every second character in the root password triggers a return(enter) and the cursor drops down to the next line item
• Because of this, unable to run fsck