As I mentioned in my previous article featured in Tech Tails Issue #883, Keychain Access is a very handy utility. It intuitively saves all your passwords in one location any time you log into a secure site and/or account. Appropriately, your passwords are essentially keys and OS X Keychain Access is…well, a keychain.
Forgetting your system admin password is equivalent to losing your keys, but resetting a password is very easy thanks to OS X’s new Recovery partition — steps I explain in article #889.
However, doing this does not change the default password that you’ve forgotten. Because of this, you will be prompted to enter a keychain password each time an application requires authentication that your (old) keychain would normally provide.
There is a solution to resolving this and it requires deleting the login keychain. Though not a very intuitive process in previous versions of OS X, Mavericks makes it much more clear for basic users.
If you don’t remember your original password, you’ll need to delete the keychain. Deleting a keychain also deletes all the password data saved in that keychain. This shouldn’t be a major concern, assuming that you remember all your passwords for your various accounts.
- In Keychain Access, choose Preferences from the Keychain Access menu.
- If available, click the Reset My Default Keychain button. This will remove the login keychain and create a new one with the password provided.
- If Reset My Default Keychain is not available, choose Keychain List from the Edit menu.
- Delete the “login” keychain.
The next time you log in to the account, you can save your current password in a keychain.