Recovering a lost Mac OS X password

Some of the other guides I’ve seen are inaccurate and didn’t work very well for me. This did.

You can change your account password, but you cannot change your keychain password. Your login keychain has the same password as your account, which you lost. You have to delete it. You’ll lose everything in it. Sorry. Consider buying a .Mac account (which syncs Keychains) while you’re doing this.

  1. Boot (or reboot) your Mac. Hold down Command-S while it boots.
  2. Your Mac will boot into a textual single-user mode. At the # prompt, run:
    /sbin/mount -uw /
  3. Now, run: passwd your-login-name
  4. Enter your new password. Now, run reboot
  5. You system will boot. Log in with the password you just set. You’ll get a message about your login keychain. Hit “Cancel.”
  6. Open Finder. Navigate to Library/Keychains in your home directory. Trash login.keychain
  7. Log out, then back in.

  8. That’s it.

2008/04/21
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