retrieving system administrator log in and password

What version of OS X are you running? See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1274.

Clinton

Start up from your installations disc and select Reset Password from the Utilities menu.

Clinton

You're welcome.

Clinton

Hope it's not too late to join this thread;

All well and good to start up from the Install disk (works great in OS 10.4) but these days, no disks come with the machine and in fact, the new machines don't even have a place to put an optical disk if you had one.

So now since I just bought a refurbished iMac with Intel CPU (ugh but we gotta live with it) which DOES have an optical drive (it's an antique from way back in 2011) but no install disks or any disks, what can I do to reset the System Administrator's password? Since OS install now needs to be done over the internet, can the process be started here with my slow DSL and run just long enough to reset the password and then bail out? Or can I make some kind of a disk that will work? The last thing I want to do is download 4GB over DSL and from what I've read elsewhere, after the install is completed, the file or whatever disappears so I'd have to download it all over again if I wanted to do another install in a week or two.

Am I right in thinking that too many people from Redmond are now working in Cupertino?

Dave

I see that I'm replying to myself but that happens all the time so no big deal.

I searched the net and found a couple of sites that describe methods to reset the system administrator password without using the install CD / DVD.

http://www.macyourself.com/2011/08/20/

is one,

http://www.wikihow.com/Reset-a-Lost-Admin-Password-on-Mac-OS-X

is the other.

Both describe similar steps using Single-User mode (hold down Command-S at startup time) and they both omit the fact that in OS 10.8.2 the name "root" does not appear in the list of users; you can still enter the command to reset that user's password. They are correct in stating that the cursor will not move as you type the new password nor will the password appear but just hit return at the end and it actually works.

A couple of additional comments -

One step of the procedure is to mount a disk volume and that line is listed in the steps as "mount -uw /" but several people including me neglected to put the slash "/" at the end and ended up getting a message about a socket not being available or something like that about a socket. Be sure to put the slash at the end of the mount command, with a space between it and the "-uw".

There is also a command in one of the sites' steps that is "launchctl load /System/Library..." but that step is not in the other site's list of steps. I did that step so I don't know what would happen had I omitted it but it didn't seem to cause any damage so I guess it was ok. Other than that, the two list of steps from the two sites seem about the same.