Fortunately, with Mac OS X’s built-in password manager, you can easily recover those lost passwords without having to bother with the password reset debacle. Use Keychain Access to search for. To reset the administrator password using the Mac OS X installation disc: Insert the Mac OS X installation disc into your computer’s optical drive (or an optical drive connected to your computer), and then double-click the Install Mac OS X icon. In the Installer, click Utilities, and then click Restart.
From the Mac Help, when searching for 'forgot password': If you forget your administrator password If you don’t remember your administrator password, you can reset it using the Mac OS X installation disc. To reset the administrator password using the Mac OS X installation disc:. Insert the Mac OS X installation disc into your computer’s optical drive (or an optical drive connected to your computer), and then double-click the Install Mac OS X icon.
In the Installer, click Utilities, and then click Restart. When the Language Chooser appears, select your language, and then click the Continue button (looks like an arrow). In the Installer, choose Utilities Reset Password. Follow the onscreen instructions to change the password.
. Boot into single user mode (press Command-S at power on). Type fsck -fy. Type mount -uw /. Type launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist.
Type dscl.passwd /Users/username password, replacing username with the targeted user and password with the desired password. Reboot This allows you to reset the password in single user mode without booting from the install media. robg adds: For everyone about to comment about this massive security hole, please don't do so. We ran at the time of the OS X 10.0 release, and you can read the comments there for some of the give and take on the security issue.
The bottom line is that someone with physical access has full access to your machine, regardless of whether or not they happened to bring a boot DVD with them. If you're truly worried about such things, then you'll want to use a combination of File Vault, and a case lock to minimize the chances that your machine is accessed. Hmmm this article does only delete a part of a user's record, the AuthAuthority value, in fact. This article is useful if you have a user created in 10.2.x and migrated in 10.5. Beginning with 10.3, Apple changed the way passwords are stored for more security. Before 10.3, passwords were stored in the NetInfo database, in the users entries, using the unsecure crypt hash. Starting with 10.3, passwords are using stronger hashes (SHA-1 and beginning with 10.4 a Salted-SHA1) and they are no longer stored in the users entries but in /private/var/db/shadow/hash, in a file which is named with each user's GeneratedUID (not the old unix UID, be careful).
This folder is only accessible to root and the AuthAuthority attribute tells the system which kind of password you have. So, if your user was created before 10.3 and you have migrated it, you may want to do what this KB article explains. You don't have to worry about the Keychain password. Once you change the user's password and can log into the computer all need to do is simply go into the Accounts preference pane and change the password there to either the new password or something different if you so choose. That action will then automatically change the Keychain Password. I've done this several hundred times on Macs from 10.0 through 10.4.11 I haven't yet had to change a password on a Leopard box but I'm sure it will work just the same.
![Password Password](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125578022/541258598.jpg)
Tino XIII. Aside from Open Firmware/EFI passwords, you can configure your Mac so that the root password must be entered in order to access Single User Mode. If your root account is disabled, then it is impossible to enter the root password, and Single User Mode cannot be started. To do this, the console and ttys must be marked as insecure in /etc/ttys: 1. Log in as administrator 2. Open Terminal 3. Sudo cp ttys ttys.old (backs up previous ttys config).
Sudo pico ttys 6. Replace all occurrences of the word 'secure' with 'insecure' at any lines that do not begin with a '#' 7.
Exit, saving changes. These instructions are from the Apple Mac OS X Security Configuration manual.