RHEL 8.6 not going into emergency mode

[janbaztaimoor]

I am preparing for RHCSA exam using RHEL 8.6 on vmware workstation 15. I am self-studying. Was practicing password recovery. The turotial I am following says
=>Break bootup process
=>while pressing "e" button on keyboard, edit the line start with "linux" and append rd.break\ enforcing=0.
after that when I press "ctrl+x" to boot, it dosent go to command prompt and continue the interrupted process and takes me to log on screen. I thought maybe something wrong with vmware or the guest OS but when I checked it on my laptop, I faced the same problem.

Any Ideas ???

Taimoor Falak

[Fran_Garcia · Accepted solution]

The directive is rd.break ; it seems you're typing a backslash (\) immediately after the directive. There should be an space there, such as  "rd.break enforcing=0"  (without quotes).

Hope this helps

fran

[janbaztaimoor]

First of all thanks for the reply and also it worked.
Secondly I did put space between rd.break and enforcing=0.
The problem was with the semicolon.
It was not there in the 1st place so I assumed its not needed.
But it looks like just its like a C++ statement which must end with " ; ".

[Tracy_Baker · Accepted solution]

First, there should be no semicolon (it is not C++) or \

\ is not part of the grub configuration. It is put there to let you know that a line continues to the next line.

Because rd.break keeps SELinux from loading, enforcing=0 is a meaningless directive and therefore isn't needed. Leave it out.

In other words, all you need is just rd.break at the end of the line that begins "linux".

Also the title of your post "RHEL 8.6 not going into emergency mode" is misleading. You do not go into emergency mode to reset a password (you can't, because to do so would mean knowing root's password).

If you want to go into emergency mode from grub, add this to the end of the line that begins "linux": systemd.unit=emergency.target

Then press Ctrl-x

[janbaztaimoor]

Thank You very much for taking your time and replying to my post.
Those are some valuable lessons. Will keep them in mind.