If, for some reason, the first account is borked or the password forgotten, a second administrator account can come to the rescue. Experience has shown that it's always wise to have two named administrators of any Mac. From there you can manage the rest of of the users if necessary with System Preferences > Users & Groups.Ī final note. If all went well, when the Mac restarts normally, you'll be able to log in to the administrator account with the new password you defined in step #5 above. Select OS X Utilities > Quit OS X Utilities.
(See the note at the top of this article about the administrator's name). A new window will open, like the one below on the right.Įntering "resetpassword" then Return, in the terminal, opens the GUI on the right.Ĭlick on the volume of interest and select the desired user account in the popup.
In the terminal window type the following and hit the Return key. You won't have to do anything exotic on the Unix command line.Ĥ. Screen shots not available at this stage. Instead, you'll go to the Menu bar at the top and select Utilities > Terminal. When booting is complete, you'll see a window of "OS X Utilities." You won't do anything there. This will force the Mac to boot into OS X on the recovery partition that was created when you installed OS X 10.7 or later.ģ. Soon, you'll see the Apple logo and spinning gear. Right after you hear the chime, press and hold the Command and the R keys for a few seconds, then release.
#FORGOT PASSWORD FOR MAC OS X HOW TO#
If it's locked up, see: "Frozen: How to Force the Restart of a Mac."Ģ.
In this scenario, it's assumed that the administrator is you, and you know your account name but, for example, forgot the password. That user, in turn, can create other administrator (privileged) or unprivileged accounts. The person who first installed OS X on a Mac (or set it up out of the box) is the named administrator. It's discussed in this Apple Knowledge base article # PH6317.Ī quick note before we begin.
#FORGOT PASSWORD FOR MAC OS X INSTALL#
The older method, mentioned in the introduction, uses the install disc for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and previous. This is a hidden partition on your boot drive introduced with OS X 10.6 Lion, so the technique I'll describe works with OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The neatest, simplest way to reset the administrator password if it is, say, forgotten, is to make use of the recovery partition. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference those methods at the end of the article and stick to a fairly simple method here. Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac if you cannot log in. Nowadays, there is no install disc provided with OS X, and so an alternative method is necessary. If a user forgot the administrator password, perhaps the simplest way (of several) would be to use that disc to set a new administrator password and regain control of the Mac. In the early years of OS X, the Mac operating system was sold on a DVD.
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