Once logged into your original administrative account you can then return to User & Groups and delete the temporary admin account you created. You can now login to the original user account with the new password you just set.

Close out System Preferences and reboot.

Select your original user account from the left side Users list, and then click on the “Reset Password” button on the right.

Click on the lock icon in the lower left corner and authenticate, allowing you to make changes to user accounts.

Open “System Preferences” and click on “Users & Groups”.

You won’t see any of your familiar files or settings yet, and this is normal, because you have to reset the original password. Then reboot either through the menu item or by typing ‘reboot’ into the command line.įollow the setup procedure as usual, create the new administrative account, and wait for Mac OS X to boot as usual into the new user account. You can then login to that new administrative account and reset your original account password, or just copy your old files over if that’s what you’d rather do.įrom the Recovery Drive’s Terminal, type: In this case, you can still delete the AppleSetup file which forces the “Welcome to Mac OS X” setup assistant to run again, thus allowing you to create a new administrative account. Much like prior versions of Mac OS X, the newest OS X releases share a more untraditional and technical approach to resetting a password for user accounts.

Method 2 – Delete AppleSetupDone and Create a New Administrative Account The above method is by far the easiest, but if it’s unavailable for some reason, you can choose this secondary trick. Why the change to the Terminal method with newer versions of Mac OS? Probably for increased security, particularly now that recovery partitions are standard with Macs. This replaces the “Reset Password” menu item that used to be in place prior to OS X, which was around in Snow Leopard and before, and one of two original methods of resetting a forgotten password through more technical ways. Confirm the user account and then the password change and reboot Mac OS X as usual with your new password.Click on the “Utilities” menu and select “Terminal”.Wait for “Mac OS X Utilities” menu to appear, indicating that you are booted into recovery mode.Hold “Option” at boot and select the “Recovery” disk at the boot menu.

New Macs include a native recovery mode option through a boot partition, but a recovery disk or boot drive made yourself will work as well.

Important: You have to boot from a Recovery drive for this to work, andthe Mac must be running OS X 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9. Method 1 – Reset a Lost Mac OS X Password with Recovery Mode We’re actually going to cover two tricks, and they will work with or without internet access, and do not rely on any third party tools.

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