That user, in turn, can create other administrator (privileged) or unprivileged accounts. The person who first installed OS X on a Mac (or set it up out of the box) is the named administrator. It's discussed in this Apple Knowledge base article # PH6317.Ī quick note before we begin. The older method, mentioned in the introduction, uses the install disc for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and previous. This is a hidden partition on your boot drive introduced with OS X 10.6 Lion, so the technique I'll describe works with OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The neatest, simplest way to reset the administrator password if it is, say, forgotten, is to make use of the recovery partition. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference those methods at the end of the article and stick to a fairly simple method here. Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac if you cannot log in. Nowadays, there is no install disc provided with OS X, and so an alternative method is necessary. 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. Enter the new password (it does not appear on screen).In the early years of OS X, the Mac operating system was sold on a DVD.Replace username by the name of the desired user account.

Restart the Mac in Single User Mode and run the following commands: The procedure is slightly different for Mac OS X 10.4 ( Tiger). Reset Admin Password on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) passwd /Users/ username password and press Enter. Type ls /Users and press Enter (this command list the all users accounts registered on the computer).Type launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ and press Enter.Boot your Mac while holding the Command + S keys down to access the Single User Mode.The below instructions also applies to Mac OS X 10.5 ( Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.6 ( Snow Leopard). Reset the admin password on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 This method will be done through a system reboot in Single User Mode. This tutorial will teach you how to reset your admin password in Mac OS X 10.6 without the installation discs.

How to find administrator password mac