Resetting Your Admin Password

This article was meant to appear in the September 17th edition of Tech Tails. We’re posting here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

If you have ever forgotten your user password on your Mac, there are a few quick ways you can reset it. Depending on which version of the OS you have, the process may vary slightly. It’s nice that Apple included in all of there operating system versions a way to reset user passwords if they are lost.

I do have to warn you about this though, if you change your user password in this manner, all access to your keychain will be lost. Keychain access is the encrypted application that stores all your wifi passwords, internet passwords, or any other type of secure files. Basically everytime your mac asks if you want to save this secure piece of info, it logs it into keychain access. After any of these following processes you will need to log into the account and hit the “create new keychain” button, or you will be asked for your old password very regularly.

For users running OS version 10.6 you need to boot the machine holding down the “command” + “S” keys until you see a black background with white text. This is called single user mode and will allow you access to the unix interface that runs OSX. Once here you enter:

fsck -fy

This will check the file systems of the machine, once complete enter:

mount -uw /
passwd username(enter your user name)

After that you will see a new password field show up, type what you want your password to be and hit enter, you will need to this twice. Important note, it does not show you anything in the field, so make sure you keep track of what your typing.

In 10.7 and 10.8 the process is even easier. Boot your machine holding the “Option” key until you see two hard drive icons appear on the screen. Select the one labeled “Recovery HD”. Once this opens, go to the top menu bar and select utilities>Terminal. You will see a white square appear and here you can enter in “resetpassword” and hit the enter key. This will cause a new window to appear, select it, then in the user drop down, select the account in question. enter the new passwords in the fields below, and hit save. After you have done that its always a good idea to hit the repair permissions and ACL’s button, as this could have negative effects on your computers permission files.