Help with opening the Lock to Security and Privacy preferences

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Help with opening the Lock to Security and Privacy preferences

I updated to Catalina and now I am unable to unlock System Preferences to get to the Security and Privacy preferences. Users & Groups shows me as 'Standard' under my name. I can't open the Lock to make changes to 'Allow user to administer this computer'. I am the only user and my name is the only name there.

I did find an old post to use Terminal and then paste this:

Open Terminal, paste this in & hit return...

dscl . list /Users | grep -v '_'

I found my login name doing that but neither password for my 1. Macbook Pro nor 2. Apple ID worked to unlock it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 31, 2019 7:56 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 31, 2019 2:06 PM in response to brokenback5

If you have no Admin user, you could create a new one, if you could run Setup Assistant again.

The old way of doing this, pre Mojave was to use single user mode or Terminal in Recovery to delete the variable noted in this article:

http://www.theinstructional.com/guides/how-to-re-run-the-os-x-setup-assistant

That does not work on more recent Macs, but it would work on yours. Unfortunately, the default boot drive, normally named Macintosh HD is read only, and all the variable parts have been mode to a related Volume named Macintosh HD data.

So the volume you need to mount is the new one.

Post back if stuck.

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