Changing the root password on a Hetzner server via Rescue

Forgot the password for your Linux dedicated server? No worries — let's fix this.

First, you need to boot your dedicated server into recovery (Rescue) mode. You can do this by following this guide.

Viewing the storage devices

Use the lsblkCopied command to view the storage devices attached to your server.

If you are using Software RAID on your server, the output will look similar to this. Pay attention to the md devices, specifically md0, md1, md2:

If your server does not use Software RAID, then depending on the type of storage devices, the command output will look roughly like this:

Mounting the main disk

Next, you need to mount the main disk partition. Since our test server uses Software RAID, md2 is the appropriate choice here.

mount /dev/md2 /mnt

Excellent.

Now we set a new root directory to work with the newly mounted filesystem:

chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Changing the password

The main part of the procedure is now complete. All that remains is to use the standard command to change the password of the required user.

passwd root

Enter the new password twice.

Done.

Exiting Rescue mode

You simply need to reboot the server in the cloud control panel or by using the rebootCopied command to exit Rescue mode. After that, you can connect to your server using the new password.

If you encounter an error like this when running the rebootCopied command, use the key combination CTRL + DCopied to exit the additional session that was created.

Great. Now you can reboot your server and continue working.