When you first start using a Mac, the first thing you do is set up a user account, which in case of being the first one created will be of the administrator type. With that account you will be able to do any action within the system.
Later, as an administrator, you will be able to create as many accounts as you want, whether they are administrator or with certain conditions. To change the administrator password, you will have to remember the old password. Otherwise, you will have to continue reading this article.
If you are in the situation of not remembering the administrator password of a certain user account, In OS X Mavericks there is the possibility of restarting it, for which we need to boot the computer from the recovery partition as long as you haven't turned on automatic login.
The steps you have to follow to be able to reset the administrator password are:
We shut down the equipment. Now we turn on the Mac and we press the cmd + R keys on the keyboard, thus accessing the recovery partition.
After the computer boots, we go to the top menu and we select the Terminal, in which we are going to write the following command and press enter.
resetpassword
A dialog box appears immediately on the screen which will show a list of boot hard drives that you have connected to the computer. If you haven't added any, only the internal one will appear.
Now you must select the disk where is the account we want to change the password for.
In the dialog box that appears go to the user menu and select the user you want.
Now in the dialog reset the password and add an indication to remember it in the future. To finish, click on save.
So far so good, the only problem you are going to find is that when you start up, the system will ask you for the lost password to unlock the system keychain. If you still can't remember that password, you're going to have to create a new keychain and give up all the passwords that you had saved in it.
If our laptop falls into someone else's hands, anyone who follows these simple steps could access our data. Can't restrict access to the terminal or set an additional password for more security?
Hi Fran, setting a Firmware and FileVault password to encrypt the data may be a solution. But in the case of loss or theft of the Mac, the person who finds it and wants to perform this trick needs to know the old password to see the others: «the only problem you are going to find is that when you start up, the system will ask for lost password to unlock system keychain »so you will not be able to access them.
If our laptop falls into someone else's hands, anyone who follows these simple steps could access our data. Can't restrict access to the terminal or set an additional password for more security?
Hi Fran, setting a Firmware and FileVault password to encrypt the data may be a solution. But in the case of loss or theft of the Mac, the person who finds it and wants to perform this trick needs to know the old password to see the others: «the only problem you are going to find is that when you start up, the system will ask for lost password to unlock system keychain »so you will not be able to access them.