My post on Mac OS X Password Recovery that I made almost a year ago continues to get comments today. It’s a fairly common issue. Since it has reached 126 comments (and the page is getting long), I’ve decided to close comments. You can continue discussion by leaving a comment here.
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THIS nearly worked but produced a “Sorry” repsonse at the point indicated below. Several ppl have raised this as a problem but nobody has come out with a way past “Sorry”. Please help. (My specs are Ibook G4 running Mac OSX 10.4.6.
Comment by Rosa Absatz
2006-11-30 00:22:50
0) Restart…
1) Hit Command-S at boot.
2) “sh /etc/rc†— this command is suggested by MacOS X itself to start important system services but stay in single-user mode.
3) “niutil -list . /users†— find out my user’s name if I was ignorant not to see it before the reboot.
4) “passwd my_nameâ€.
[system says]enter new password
[system says]enter new password
[system says] sorry
I have tried typing a very simple password very carefully in case it was a mismatch of the two password entries but this has not worked.
I had the same problem until I figured out that “my_name” isn’t a proper command. You have to type in “passwd” followed by your user name where “my_name” is. For example, if your user name is PeterSmith you have to type in “passwd_petersmith” and reset the password for that user. Once this is done, type in the reboot command and when you start up again, you will type in your new password. It worked on my Macbook Pro. Good luck.
thats gotta be the most helpful thing ive found, i was about to give up on it. thanks alot.
Ricardo’s method seems to be getting close to working for me on my mac mini. I get to the password prompt and I can enter a new password and reboot, I’m just not sure i’m doing it right. Do I type “passwd root” or do i replace “root” with the actual username of the root user. All lowercase did not seem to work, but Firstname_Lastname just like it is on the login menu except with an underscore did not seem to work either. Any suggestions?
Hello there. I finally got this puzzle almost solved. It may help the others. Here it goes:
in my mac mini, i have a 10.4, so this is what i did to change passwords without the freezing after step 4:
/sbin/mount -y
then the command starts
/sbin/mount -uw / (dont leave any space after the /)
it will say u made an illigal move, but it will keep going, after 10 seconds.
then type straight away:
/usr/libexec/register_mach_bootstrap_servers /etc/mach_init.d
it will show some of the network tabs, nonsense stuff…
then type:
cd /var/db/netinfo
then:
netinfod -s local
then type:
passwd root
enter
it will ask for new passwords, but it will look like frozen, but is not. keep going.
after new passwords, type reboot.
It worked fine for me.
Here is the combo for G5 with 10.3.9
/sbin/fsck -y
enter
mount -uw
enter
/sbin/mount -uw
enter
rm /var/db/.applesetupdone
enter
reboot
enter
should see set up wizard!