Whenever I explain the organization of the Apple Operating System to a customer, I like to use the analogy of a neighborhood. This wasn’t too hard to come up with considering Apple defines your user folder as the “home” folder. Within your home are various rooms (i.e. Documents, Pictures, Movies, Music, etc), and within your home, you can rearrange things however you like. It’s when people start saving things outside of their home folder that issues can arise with how the operating system is designed to work.
When this happens, I explain that by doing so, you’re essentially digging up other people’s yards within your neighborhood. Often, people think saving data to their hard drive requires simply dragging and dropping to the “Macintosh HD” volume on their desktop. I suspect this is one reason why Lion and Mountain Lion have — by default — removed immediate access to the root level of the user’s drive.
Within this analogy, I like to introduce a great utility called Keychain Access. Not unlike a ring to save various keys you might own, Keychain Access saves all passwords that you may use on a daily basis. As long as you know your administrator password — the one created when setting up your user — you can retrieve any forgotten password that you’ve used.
To do so, go to Go > Utilities > Keychain Access. Once the window appears, simply navigate to “Passwords” under the Category sidebar. Within that, double click on the one that you’ve forgotten. From there, a secondary window will appear and by checking “Show Password”, Keychain Access will ask for your admin password. After entering it, you’ll have your much-needed password.