

That user, in turn, can create other administrator (privileged) or unprivileged accounts. The person who first installed OS X on a Mac (or set it up out of the box) is the named administrator. It's discussed in this Apple Knowledge base article # PH6317.Ī quick note before we begin. The older method, mentioned in the introduction, uses the install disc for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and previous. This is a hidden partition on your boot drive introduced with OS X 10.6 Lion, so the technique I'll describe works with OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion and OS X 10.9 Mavericks. The neatest, simplest way to reset the administrator password if it is, say, forgotten, is to make use of the recovery partition. For the sake of completeness, I'll reference those methods at the end of the article and stick to a fairly simple method here. Some of them are rather Unix-geeky and can make a novice user nervous. To be clear, there are several technical ways to reset the administrator password on a Mac if you cannot log in. Nowadays, there is no install disc provided with OS X, and so an alternative method is necessary.

If a user forgot the administrator password, perhaps the simplest way (of several) would be to use that disc to set a new administrator password and regain control of the Mac.

In the early years of OS X, the Mac operating system was sold on a DVD.
