Admin Password Issue

If your user is an Admin user account, then the password that you supply for installing things IS your admin password. What happens when you try to change it in System Prefs > Users & Groups?

You can reset the admin password following the steps here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1274

Or are you talking about your AppleID password?

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5787

hi there,

if you can install software or apply Updates from Apple, your user account does have admin privileges.

Unfortunately benwiggy gave you a support link for older versions of OSX. With Mavericks the said menu entry is gone from the Utilities menu. Therefore an extra step is necessary to regain access to the program which allows you to change passwords without knowing them.

To do so, press the ALT key at system startup. You will be presented a choice of boot options. Select "Recovery 10.9" there, select "Terminal" from the "Utilities" menu and finally enter "Resetpassword" (without the quotation marks) at the terminal's prompt.

A new window will open where you can choose Administrator from the drop down menu. The Administrator will be the first entry in the menu and have the account short name in brackets next to it

There are two things to be cautious about here:

First, make sure you select "Administrator" and not "System Administrator" in the user selection menu. The later is the root account which is only needed if you want to make changes to the FreeBSD basis of OSX. Unless you have specifically enabled this root account, it is not active on your system and its password cannot be altered.

Or could it be that you are trying to change the root password without having activated the root account beforehand. In that case you would receive exactly the error message you are referring to

Second, I am currently not sure whether this way of password retrival is possible, if FileVault is active. See these articles from Apple's knowledge base for further information:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5077

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790

Resetting Password

http://pondini.org/OSX/Password.html

Try to create a new user account by clicking the + button

OS X Mavericks: Konfigurer brukere på Mac-maskinen

Give it administrator privileges.

Log out of your usual account, into the new one, then try to change your normal account's password.

Backup first.

Presumably, the new admin account is able to change its own password ?.

If so, then after backing up I would

1: Delete the user but don't change the home folder.

then

2: Restore a deleted user using 'Restore the home folder from a saved folder'

let's clarify what happened first :

you said >>This just reset my user account password..

Isn't that what you wanted to do ?

>>I wanna change my admin password

>>this didn't work. I still get prompted: " Wrong password "

But you don't have to enter the original password when using another admin account to change the first one.

Let's try a different approach:

if you have not enabled root beforehand, the following eleven steps will activate it

1. in Finder click on Go in menu at the top of the Screen
2. from the Go menu select Computer
3. there click on Macintosh HD
4. click on System
5. click on Library
6. click on CoreServices
7. open the app named Directory Utility
8. in Directory Utility click on Edit in menu at the top of the Screen
9. from the Edit menu select Enable Root User
10. you will be asked to enter a password for root
11. if you want to keep the root account active afterwards, choose a secure and strong password

Now let's get back to the original problem:

1. Log out of your current account and log into the root account
2. Now open Terminal from the /Programs/Utilities folder
3. Enter the following command into terminal
4. cd /Users
5. there memorize the name of the account whose password needs to be reset
6. now enter this command
7. passwd <name-of-user>
8. enter a new password and reenter it to confirm
9. your password is now reset
10. since the keychain in which OSX stores all user related passwords requires the old password, you will need to create a new keychain. unfortunately you will lose the existing keychain
11. you can however save the file login.keychain from /Users/<name-of-user>/Library/Keychains in case you remember the missing password at a later time
12. now log out of the root account and log into your regular user account

If you want you can now disable the root account again by selecting Disable Root Account from the Edit menu

of the Directory Utility

Hopefully your problem is solved now 🙂

<<That password is called " Main Password ". The one I am able to change is the user password, the one I log in with on a regular basis.>>

Now that is a really important piece of information!

That might render my previous posting somewhat off topic:

The main or master password is the password that is needed for FileVault disk encryption. Let me do some quick research on that.

It sounds as if you have a legacy Filevault encrypted home folder and are not using Filevault 2

OS X: Om FileVault 2

is that right ?