How to reset the root password of VMware ESXi 4.1 and 5.0

You can't recover your old password but by following this steps you can set it to blank and then set a new one.

First you'll need a Linux live CD, any one will do.

After booting to a live session of Linux you must look for a file named state.tgz on your vmware host's hard drive. To do so I used:

parted -l

To list all available partitions and mounted every VFAT partition to look inside, I found it was on /dev/sda5, in your case it might be on a different one, you can mount the partitions with:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

(replace sda with your device's name and 1 with your partition numver)

then check inside if the file state.tgz exists:

ls /mnt/

After finding the state.tzg file you must uncompress it using:

cd /tmp
tar xzf /mnt/Hypervisor3/state.tgz

this will get you a local.tgz file witch you have to extract using:

tar xzf local.tgz

now edit the file /tmp/etc/shadow

vi etc/shadow

Inside locate the root account and just remove it's hash (everything between the first and the second colon) and login to the service console as root with no password at all.

Finally re-pack the files and move the modified state.tgz back to the VFAT partition. Probably it is a good idea to make a backup copy of the original state.tgz in case something goes wrong:

mv /mnt/state.tgz /mnt/state.tgz.bak
rm local.tgz
tar czf local.tgz etc
tar czf state.tgz local.tgz
mv state.tgz /mnt/

Reboot back into ESXi and you're done.