1. Open up a console session to the VM
2. Press Alt + F1 and try to login as root
You can see by the screenshot above that someone has tried many unsuccessful attempts to access the root account and subsequently it has been locked by the operating system.
3. Reboot the virtual machine
4. On the boot loader screen, leave the normal option chosen to boot into, however in the boot options we want to append the following to the string
init=/bin/bash
5.Now hit Enter, and the machine will now boot into a bash shell
6. enter the command “passwd “
7. enter the new password for root .
8. Reboot the server and login with new password .