Resetting a Mac password.

If you are in receipt of an Apple Mac from eBay and you cannot get administrative access then there are a couple of ways to proceed.

If your Mac responds to Apple Button + R at boot-up (and by Boot-up we mean hold it down from the power-on sound until the progress bar/circle appears under the Apple logo) then you can simply select Terminal from the utilities menu at the top of the screen and enter resetpassword to choose a new password as if you were changing it within OS X as normal.

If the system does not respond to the commands then you need to use the terminal boot-up single sign-on to Linux method:

[list=1]

Access the single-user mode by holding the Command key and S on startup.

Enter “mount –uw /” then press return.

Enter “launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist” then press return.

Enter “passwd [username]” then press return.

Replace [username] with the name of your account.

Reset your password.

Type in “reboot” then press return.

Log in with the new admin password.[/list]

If you simply want to take the Mac back to defaults you can also re-run the initial set-up for first user wizard.

This is done using the same first two steps as above but once in Terminal,

[list=1]

Enter fsck -fy

Enter mount -uw /

Enter rm /var/db/.applesetupdone

Enter Reboot[/list]

Now the Mac will see that set-up is incomplete and perform the first time logon wizard for a new user.

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