(Bear with me-as far as I know, you can't take screenshots in the Recovery System, and I just couldn't bring myself to take pictures with my phone and use them here.) You're going to need to log in to your Mac's Recovery System, and you do that by holding down Command-R while your machine's restarting.
FORGOT PASSWORD FOR MAC ADMINISTRATOR HOW TO
If you set things up ahead of time, you can use your Apple ID to reset that password, and I wrote an article on how to do that a while back.īut if you didn't configure that before you forgot the password, you're still OK, because there's a super-secret ninja way to get around those restrictions. What if the password you can't remember is your administrator password, and it's the only administrator account on your Mac? That'll mean that when you try to log in as a different user, you can't even unlock the System Preferences pane because you don't know the only existing administrator password! You're totally screwed, right? Well, maybe, but not where your Mac is concerned. See how my "karma" account is greyed out in the second screenshot above, with an orange checkmark next to its picture? That's because it's still logged in, so if I need to reset that user's password, I'll have to log him out first. Lastly, the account you're trying to work with can't be logged in using fast user switching. (But if the sole administrator password is the one you've lost, see below.) Second caveat: You can't reset the password on an account you're currently logged into unless you know the existing password, so log into a different user account if you need to make changes. Unfortunately, you'll have to re-enter all of those passwords in a new keychain, which OS X will prompt your user to create the next time he logs in. This means that the user's keychain-which stores things like email passwords for Apple Mail, Wi-Fi passwords, and so on-won't be usable unless you recover that original password.
First, as the box above points out, resetting a lost password won't change the login keychain password for that account. Seems simple, right? But there are a few caveats here. Then OS X will ask you to enter the new password. The first, easiest way starts like this: Open System Preferences > Users & Groups, click on the lock at the bottom-left of the window to unlock the pane, and then enter an administrator's name and password so you can edit things.Īfter that, click on the account you've forgotten the password for and choose Reset Password. If you forget an account password in Lion or Mountain Lion, there are lots of ways to reset it.
0 kommentar(er)
