In this post i will show how to reset root password in ESXi 5.5. For this first we need any bootable linux distributor. In my example i used Ubuntu 16.04. Boot from Ubuntu disk. Select try Ubuntu, wait for loading. After full loading open Terminal. Type fdisk -l for list all partitions hypervisor/system image is located on the first 250 MB partition (/dev/sda5) which contains the state.tgz file. Mount /dev/sda5 to /mnt sudo -s mount /dev/sda5 /mnt. Go to the /mnt cd /mnt . Copy state.tgz to /tmp folder cp state.tgz /tmp , cd /tmp. Unarchive state.tgz tar xzf state.tgz then tar xzf local.tgz Go to the /etc directory in /tmp folder cd etc/ . For deleting resetting password open shadow file with nano shadow delete the password hash of ESXi root account. Close nano editor. Re add etc/ folder to local.tgz : tar czf local.tgz etc after it readd local.tgz to state.tgz: tar czf state.tgz local.tgz . Copy state.tgz mnt/...
My name is Ibrahim. This is my personal site. Here i put information which i faced during work. I hope this will help full for others.