Yesterday I made a Fedora 30 VM on my RHEL 7 box, and for some reason I couldn’t log in as root after the installation finished. Well, it’s been a while, so I had to look it up, and following the instructions didn’t work either—I finally managed to get a shell, but the terminal was corrupted. Because it was a VM? Because the instructions were out of date? I’ve no idea. Anyway, here’s what I did, with the stuff that wasn’t in the instructions underlined:

1. Reboot and wait for the GRUB menu to appear. You may need to be pressing Shift for this to happen.
2. In the menu, highlight any entry and press e to edit it.
3. Find the line beginning with linux. Remove the rhgb and quiet options, then add init=/bin/sh at the end of the line.
4. Press Ctrl-X to boot with those options. After a while you should get a root shell. The prompt was sh-5.0# on my system, not sh-4.2# like the instructions say, but it doesn’t matter.
5. Run the commands in the instructions:

   /usr/sbin/load_policy -i
   mount -o remount,rw /
   passwd root
   mount -o remount,ro /

6. The instructions say to reboot now, but none of the commands to reboot the system worked at this point. Probably they expected systemd. No problem, I hit “Force Reset” in Virtual Machine Manager. I probably should have run a sync or two beforehand, but I didn’t think to.

Ta-da, working system😁