Mac OS X: How to reset your users password

7th January, 2006     Life,

[Do note, this isn't the easiest option, but it is the option that works when you do not have a Mac OS Install CD lying around.]

A friend brang over his iBook today, after forgetting his username's password, and thus being unable to login. I figured this would be easy. Boot into single-user mode, reset the username's password, reboot.

I was so wrong.

Booting into single-user mode wasn't that hard. Hold command + s on startup. (Command for any normal mac user is the apple-cloverleaf key right next to the spacebar).

After booting in and trying to get niutil to talk to me (which i found i had to use), it refused to listen.

Playing around with a few google methods for a while, lead me to this page, Which is fine if you use Mac OS X 10.2 or lower, but useless with any newer version.

So a bit more googling and I get this even better page.

It explains that i need to run a few scripts and start the netinfo daemon. Fair enough.

Then that didn't work, because it couldn't find the user.

Great.

Then I realise that the username contains an i not an l and that solves that. Reboot and the user can now log in. I'm happy, the friend is happy, and I decided I want to keep my gentoo box. :-)

(PS. Before i noticed the username had that i, I tried about 20 different other ways to change it. Maybe that's why i'm annoyed with it :p)