password on macbook pro lion

If there is an Apple Store nearby, you may want to walk it into that shop and ask for assistance there...they will be happy to help with all your questions and I suspect you'll have more by then 🙂

I am curious as to how did you remove the password by "simply deleting it in system"? From my understanding, to remove a password from the user account, you will need to navigate to System Preference, Users & Groups, select to change password, followed by entering your old password and leaving the New Password fields empty.

Anyway, to recover, you can try to boot into the recovery partition, select Terminal from the Utilities menu, and enter "resetpassword" at the command line. A new window pops up allowing you to reset the account by changing its current password.

When rebooting or with the system switched off, turn on the laptop, the black screen will change to a white/grey screen (can't remember) before the Apple logo appears, press and hold the lower left Option key, Select the Recovery HD partition and boot up from there.

If it came with a DVD put in the DVD and hold C to boot into it. Once in the installer menu just simply use the password reset utility to reset your password.

If it didn't come with DVDs then you'll have to use the recovery partition as soulblighter described. Hopefully the utility is in there, but that REALLY seems insecure if it is.

"Oh you forgot your password! No problem! With the recovery partition we can just boot into it and click 'reset password'!"

Yeah.. That's secure.

That is why, there is also a utiliy for you to set a firmware password to prevent unauthorised access. I believe in Linux, you are also able to boot into Single User Mode to recover or reset the root password as well. At the end of the day, both physical security, educating the users, and taking every precaution to secure a system is necessary to minimise the risk but not totally eliminate it.

From the menu, select Terminal from the Utilities menu, a new windows will appear waiting for user input. Enter "resetpassword" at the command line. Another new window pops up allowing you to reset the account by changing its current password.

Call Apple. I was going to say re-format it but looks like you already did.. See this is why I think the whole digital distribution and no DVD thing *****. I like a lot of Apples' ideas and such, but I am probably too old school to like that whole digital thing.. The first thing I did was burn my own Lion restore DVD.

I had no clue you could set a firmare password.. I'm sure that's not easy to reset, but the ease of which you could 'break into' a Mac always bugged me. Firmware password aside.

And I don't know if you can do that in Linux.. That seems absolutely insane.