Of Lost Passwords and Recovering Them

Funny story.. My cousin calls me up a few nights ago. He was frantic. He said his business partner screwed up their MacBook. They couldn’t login to the MacBook because it wouldn’t accept the password. They kept trying and trying but to no avail. So he asked me if I could just try to recover their files and reinstall OS X. I said, bring the Mac over and let’s see.

So he brought the Mac today. I was set to have an afternoon filled with recovering data and reinstalling apps. So I looked at his Mac and it was booted all the way to the login screen. I thought to myself, let’s try just hitting the return key and see if works. It did! Somehow his business partner must have reset the password to an empty one.

The lesson to be learned here is never to play with your Mac drunk. Apparently his partner was drunk when he was playing with his Mac. So the entire afternoon my cousin never heard the end of it from me.

Anyway… Just so that this post is not a total loss, I’m including a link from the Apple support section. This is where you’ll find info on recovering, resetting admin and user passwords. Just in case you forgot your password and need to reset. But before you reset, just try the empty password thing that I did. Who knows that might just do the trick.

Mac OS X v10.5 Accounts, Passwords and Security page.