Have you ever forgotten a password? I know that I have. With all of the increased security measures that go into making a password these days like upper/lower case letters, numbers and now symbols it is getting harder to remember it all. Luckily for you, I am going to talk about how to reset your login password on your Mac running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).
A word of caution: this method requires you to use Terminal and write a small amount in sudo. If you do not feel comfortable doing that, don’t proceed. Using Terminal can quickly damage your machine faster than fixing it if you don’t know what you are doing. Please use this method at your own risk; Small Dog is not accountable for any damage done by following these steps. You can always bring your machine to any of our retail locations where we have certified Apple Technicians who are trained to reset passwords.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into the nitty gritty and reset your password.
Step 1: Reseting The Machine
The easiest way to accomplish this is to press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds until your computer shuts down — this is sometimes known as a hard boot or reset. I don’t recommend using this method to shut your computer down all the time. In fact, it is always best to let the operating system shut the computer down if that option is available to you.
Step 2: Booting Into Recovery Partition
Before powering up press and hold the command and R keys. Then with your other hand press the power button to turn the machine on. I recommend doing this in that order because if you aren’t fast enough you will miss the small window of time when the computer recognizes these key combinations and you will have to start over again.
Step 3: Accessing Terminal
Go to the Utilities drop down menu and select Terminal. This will open up a new Terminal window for you to begin typing in — but don’t type anything yet.
Step 4: Accessing Reset Password Utility
In the Terminal window type “resetpassword” without the quotation marks and hit enter. This will bring up the Reset Password utility in a new window. That little bit of sudo is all you need to type in Terminal. I told you it was a small amount, but if you go on using Terminal as a text editor to write your next term paper (don’t do it) you can seriously mess up your machine.
Step 5: Resetting The Password
We are now in the home stretch.
- Select which Volume Hard Drive you need to change the password for. Most people will have just one hard drive to select from. If you have more than one then you should know why because you probably did it.
- Select the user whose password you want change from the drop down menu.
- Enter a new password for that user.
- Reenter the new password for that user.
- If you want you can enter a hint for that password but it is not required.
- Hit the Save button in the bottom right of the window.
- A new window will pop up confirming the password change.
Step 6: Finishing Up
At this point your password has been reset. Now we just need to reset the computer to boot back into the operating system. To do this, go to the Apple drop down menu in the top left of the screen and select Restart. Your computer will restart itself and you can enter your new password at the login screen. Ta-Da; password reset success!