Mac OS X - Resetting a Forgotten Account Password

Hello Folk~

Happy New Year! sighs so excited in new year ahaha..ok back to topic!

Today my friend just call me to help him to update old school iMac ( 1998 year made but still kicking da ass).

The biggest problem with this baby is…the owner forget the root a.k.a “Admin” passwd and lost Mac OS X Install Disc thoo! sighs..

We do not know current admin password.
We want to create a new admin password.
We totaly lost the Mac OS X Install Dics.

We will create new admin password Using “Single User Mode” (SUM) method.

To get to single-user mode, hold down the command (i.e. cloverleaf or Apple) and “s” keys as the system begins to boot. This will drop you into a command line interface before the system has fully started up, giving you the chance to check/repair things before much of the normal OS X environment starts up.

Single-user mode starts you with an extremely minimal environment — not only is the normal graphical interface not running, neither are most of the normal system daemons (init and mach-init are the only ones), and the boot disk isn’t even fully mounted! Usually, you want to bring at least a little more of OS X up in order to get anything useful done. Exactly how much depends on what you want to do, but usually you want to either just mount the boot volume for write access, or do that and then start the various system daemons and components (e.g. networking) that make up most of the non-graphical parts of Mac OS X.

Restart your computer while holding down the Command (aka CMD aka Apple aka Place of Interest) key and the “S” key at the same time. Your computer should boot to a black screen with white text. Wait until a prompt that says:

root#

appears.

At the prompt, type the following, exactly as shown and press enter after each command listed. (case-sensitive)

/sbin/fsck -y

/sbin/mount -uaw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

This removes the file the computer checks for on boot (.AppleSetupDone) to see if your computer has been setup yet. If it doesn’t exist, your computer will go through the usual steps of setup (the multiple languages saying “Welcome”, etc).

Next, type:

reboot

And after hitting Enter, your computer will reboot. You can follow setup, and create a new admin user. After doing so, you can delete the old admin user if you purchased the computer used. (not recommended if it’s not your computer) .

Viola! you pwn tha system!