Image credit: Apple In the early years of OS X, the Mac operating system was sold on a DVD. 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. Nowadays, there is no install disc provided with OS X, and so an alternative method is necessary. ___________________ To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac.

Jan 11, 2012 - Resetting the MacOS X Tiger administrator password can be done by booting with the Installation Disk, and selecting the appropriate menu. I bet you’ll be surprised how easy it is to change the administrator (known in Unix parlance as “root”) password on a Mac OS X Tiger, Panther, etc., computer. The key to unlocking your system is the Mac OS X install disk.

Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference those methods at the end of this article. For now, we'll start with the easy ones. Use Your Apple ID When you first set up your Mac or upgraded the OS, The Setup Assistant will ask if you want to allow your Apple ID to reset the user (admin) password. If you did that, the box in System Preferences > Users & Groups was set. Code for virtualbox mac.

System Preferences > Users & Groups Now, assuming you've forgotten your password, If you incorrectly enter your account password at the login window three times, a message appears stating 'If you forgot your password, you can reset it using your Apple ID'. Click the arrow-in-a-circle icon to bring up the 'Reset Password' dialog. Enter your Apple ID and password, then click 'Reset Password' to proceed.

However, if you deselected that box, and later forgot your password, you're out of luck. One reason to deselect the box is extreme security. If, heaven forbid, Apple's system is hacked, your admin password could be compromised. On to the next technique. Use Another Administrator Account One administrator has the power to reset the password of another administrator. If you've previously set up your Mac with two administrator accounts, highly recommended, you can use the second admin account to login in and reset the password for the first administrator whose password has been forgotten. If you can't do that, on to the next technique.

Recovery Partition If the techniques above aren't available, a very neat, simple way to reset the administrator password is to make use of the OS X Recovery Partition. This is a hidden partition on your boot drive introduced with OS X 10.7 Lion, so the technique I'll describe works with OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks and OS X 10.10 Yosemite. (The older method, mentioned in the introduction above, uses the install disc for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and previous. It's discussed in this. It's no longer being updated by Apple, but if you're still using Snow Leopard or older, it still works.) As a reminder, the person who first installed OS X on a Mac (or set it up out of the box) is the administrator. In this scenario, it's assumed that the administrator is you, and you know your account name but forgot the password. Restart the Mac.

If it's locked up, see: ' 2. Right after you hear the chime, press and hold the Command and the R keys for a few seconds, then release. Soon, you'll see the Apple logo and spinning gear (or progress bar in Yosemite).

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. When booting is complete, you'll see a window of 'OS X Utilities.' You won't do anything there. Instead, you'll go to the Menu bar at the top and select Utilities > Terminal. What you see after booting into Recovery Partition. You won't have to do anything exotic on the Unix command line.

In the terminal window type the following and hit Return. Resetpassword 5. A new window will open, like this: What you'll see after you enter 'resetpassword' Click on the 1) volume of interest, 2) select the desired user account name in the popup. Then enter the new password (twice). A password hint is optional.