ESXI 6.5 root account

[awangatboo]

I have a bad feeling you all will tell me I am out of Luck but I have run into an issue.

I have an ESXi Hypervisor running at home.  It is the free version running on an older Dell PC I have.  I only really have 2 active VM's.  Several Months ago I installed 6.5 on this newer older Dell and moved my disks to the new system.  I got most things set up just like under 6.0 and left it alone.  I was going to show my son something in the ESXi interface when I tried to log in as root I could not.  I am 99.999% sure I have not been hacked and I have not changed the password.  When I looked online I see the issue of expiring password.  I assume that is what happened to the root account.  I am hoping there is a way to get into the box.  When I am at the console and hit the F2 key it prompts for a login.  My root password does not work there.  Any ideas?  I really do not want to lose my VM's and I know that one of the VM's is on the same drive as the boot drive.  Any recommendations or help would be greatly appreciated.   

[awangatboo · Accepted solution]

I am really Lucky!

I kept looking over the internet and found this VMware KB ESXi Passwords and Account Lockout   That is this really helped me except when I read the part about password complexity.  Then it hit me that I was leaving the special character out of the password.  I tried again with the special character and got in.  Now on to see if I can make another account to get in with that has enough access to reset root if this ever happens again.