If your Mac restarts, skip to the next section, but if your Mac doesn’t restart, rather it immediately asks for your Apple ID credentials, enter that information and click Reset Password.

Click the option to reset using your Apple ID.

There’s four options below, and sometimes you don’t get the benefit of choosing which one you can use, so it’s a little bit of trial and error. If you can’t see a question mark, enter any password three times (yep, this isn’t a joke, I promise). Plus if you want toĬhange the username on your Mac? Here’s how to do that.To see the options of how to reset your Mac password, click the question mark next to the password field in the login window.

Type ‘reboot’ (no quotes) then hit Enter to restart your Mac.Īdvice for choosing a good password here.

At the next prompt, enter your password again to confirm and hit enter.

Enter your new password, then hit enter.

Type ‘passwd username’ (no quotes) replacing ‘username’ with the name of your admin account.

Type ‘launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/’ (no quotes) and hit Enter.

Type ‘mount -uw /’ (no quotes) and press Enter.Shutdown, then start up your Mac and hold down Command-S at boot to enter single-user mode.

Note: Enter the commands exactly as shown, the commands are case & space sensitive. Keep in mind this requires some command-line trickery and will probably require you to write down or take a picture of the following. Reset your admin password using Single-user mode.Īll else failing, you can boot your computer into single-user mode to reset your admin password.

After saving, go to the Apple Menu and click Restart.

This will launch the reset utility, which allows you to select a drive, a user, then a new password and password hint for your admin user.

At the Terminal prompt, type ‘ resetpassword‘ then hit enter.

Click on Utilities in the Apple menu and select Terminal.

When the machine boots, you will the OS X Utilities screen.

(Note: If you see a login window or your own desktop and icons, it’s possible that you didn’t hold Command-R early enough.

When you see the start up screen, you can let go of the keys.

Boot to the recovery partition on your original drive by holding down Command-R during the startup process.

Lost admin password mac