When you see the command prompt, enter the following command to put the boot drive into read and write mode: Restart your Mac and hold down Command-S at the boot chimes. To proceed you’ll need to know the short name of the account for which you would like to reset the password, and then perform the following steps:

While this account is generally hidden and inaccessible, you can quickly get to it for its administrative capabilities by booting your Mac into single-user mode. Use Single-User modeĮvery Mac has a main user account called “root,” which is the system account that’s used to launch the essential background services required for your Mac to operate. Log into your administrator account to change another account’s password. If you configure your Mac this way you can then log into the admin account and use the Users & Groups system preferences to change your main account’s password. To maximize your Mac’s security you should have both an administrator account for administrative tasks and a standard account that you use for your primary identity (you can still perform administrative tasks from within your main account by authenticating with the administrator credentials). The approaches I outline below depend on how much access to your Mac you currently have. Resetting your PasswordĪpple includes several options for resetting account passwords in OS X. Or you may simply forget what your password is, which can happen if you use a standard user account for daily tasks and haven’t touched the administrators account in awhile.įortunately, if you have lost your password, there are several approaches you can take for either regaining complete access to your Mac or, at least, getting to the specific data you need. Of course, there’s a slight danger that a day will come when that password doesn’t work-you’ve modified your Mac in some way that’s password-unfriendly or you’ve been negligent. Even though you can set up your Mac to automatically log into your user account without a password, your computer is going to be more secure if you use one.

Mac change password for another user