Updated: 12 October 2026 · Applies to: Ucartz KVM VPS managed with Virtualizor (end user panel); manual reset tested with Debian 13 and AlmaLinux 10.2 in containers

If you have lost the root password (Linux) or the Administrator password (Windows) of your VPS, set a new one in Virtualizor: open the VPS, click Change Password, enter the new password, click Change Password and then restart the VPS. On a KVM VPS the new password only takes effect after the VPS boots again, according to Virtualizor's documentation. If the panel cannot change it, use rescue mode as described further down.

Reset the password from the panel

  1. Log in to the Ucartz client area, open Services › My Services and click your VPS. The Virtualizor VPS dashboard is on the service page. (You can also log in to the Virtualizor panel directly with the address in your VPS welcome email and open the VPS from List VPS.)
  2. Click Change Password.
  3. Enter the new password and click Change Password.
  4. Click Restart. Virtualizor applies the new password when the VPS boots again; until then the old one keeps working.
  5. Log in over SSH or the VNC console with the new password.

If the old password still works after the restart, shut the VPS down and start it again from the panel (see How to Shut Down Your VPS Safely or Forcefully via Virtualizor and How to Start or Boot Your VPS Using Virtualizor), so that it really boots again.

Which password are you resetting?

When the panel cannot change the password

The panel reset may not work in these cases:

  • The operating system was installed from your own ISO (manual installation). Virtualizor warns that a VPS created from an ISO has an extra System Reserved partition that causes problems with setting the password (it describes this for Windows), and the panel may not be able to change the password of any system it did not install from its own template.
  • Windows, when the administrator account is not named Administrator: according to Virtualizor, it can only set the password of the account with that name.

On a Linux VPS, reset the password yourself through rescue mode. On a Windows VPS installed by our engineers, open a Technical Support ticket and we will help.

Reset a Linux root password in rescue mode

Rescue mode starts a small Debian-based system next to your VPS, from which you can mount your own disk.

  1. Enable rescue mode and set a password for the rescue system: How to Enable Rescue Mode for Your VPS Using Virtualizor.
  2. Connect with SSH to your VPS IP address as root with that rescue password.
  3. Find the partition that holds your root file system with lsblk -f and mount it with mount /dev/vdX1 /mnt, replacing vdX1 with the name lsblk shows for your own disk.
  4. Set the new password with your system's own passwd:
    chroot /mnt passwd root
    This is the result on our Debian 13 and AlmaLinux 10.2 test systems:
    New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
    If the two entries differ you get Sorry, passwords do not match. and passwd: password unchanged; run the command again.
  5. On AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, RHEL and other systems with SELinux, also run touch /mnt/.autorelabel. Without a relabel, the changed password file can carry the wrong SELinux label and logins can fail; Red Hat's own reset procedure includes the same step. The first boot then takes longer and restarts once by itself.
  6. Run umount /mnt, then turn rescue mode off (How to Disable Rescue Mode in Virtualizor) and log in with the new password.

Prefer the console? With the VNC console you can also reset the password from the boot menu. Red Hat documents this for RHEL 9: press e at the GRUB menu, add rd.break to the end of the line that starts with linux, press Ctrl+X, then run mount -o remount,rw /sysroot, chroot /sysroot, passwd and touch /.autorelabel, then type exit twice. The system relabels its files and reboots by itself. On AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux and RHEL 10 this emergency shell can ask for the root password, so on version 10 use rescue mode as described above. How to Boot into Single User Mode in CentOS/RHEL 7? covers the older RHEL 7 method.

PiKVM and other KVM-over-IP devices

A VPS has no physical KVM switch. If you searched for the root password of a PiKVM device, that is set on the device itself: according to the PiKVM documentation, run rw, then passwd root for the operating system and kvmd-htpasswd set admin for the web interface, then ro. Change both default passwords as soon as you set the device up.

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