[CentOS] Any alternative to Single User Mode

Hi,
I am working on Centos6.6 on a VirtualBox on Windows Host. Today I started
to have booting issues in the OS. It won't get past the loading screen. I
checked and found that the files related to the user "cloudera" on the
system were not accessible. Only the files related to root were accessible.
This is why I was am not able to do a single user login but an emergency
login was possible. This is just a guess.
This all happened due to some update in the Virtual Machine that I use to
run CentOS.

Is there any workaround for this issue?

Thanks and regards,
Animesh Pandey