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    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/ folder: cp state.tgz /mnt/ . umount /mnt