systemd is like the service manager for your Centos and other modern Linux distributions (including Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) allows you to enable services, stop them, restart them, check their status and even reboot your system.
The key commands or arguments you will use with systemctl are the following:
Unit Commands:
list-units [PATTERN...] List loaded units
&nbs........
This guide will work for most modern Linux versions like Centos RHEL 7, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu etc...
In Centos 7 the days of editing the "kernel"line and adding "single"are gone. On top of that sometimes after a new install passwords do not work, maybe you forgot your password or for some other reason you need to break in or fix your system? It could also be because you can't mount your root / or some other /etc/fstab error and many other err........
You may get this after a long time of not rebooting but especially if you have rsync'd a / partition or deployed an image to another VPS or computer, you will often have this issue.
The good thing it usually just takes a reboot.
Here is more info from Centos........