Change an Admin Password in Mac OS X Single User Mode

You can change the Admin password easily by booting into Mac OS X‘s command line Single User Mode. If you want to know how to change the Admin password in Mac OS X Single User Mode then simply follow the step by step instructions posted below using which you can easily change the Admin password.

How to Change the Admin Password with Mac OS X Single User Mode:

• First you need to enter Single User Mode. Reboot the Mac and hold down Command+S at boot to enter into the command line.
• You’ll see a note where Mac OS X tells you that you need to run two commands in order to make filesystem changes, this is necessary so let’s handle that first
• The first command checks the Mac OS X filesystem for errors and fixes them, it can take a few minutes to run:

  fsck -fy
  

• The next command mounts the root Mac OS X drive as writable, allowing you to make changes to the filesystem:

  mount -uw /
  

• After the filesystem is mounted, you can reset any users password using the following command:

  passwd username
  

• You’ll need to enter the new password twice to reset and confirm the changes

If you don’t know the admin username? No problem
If you’re fixing someones machine and you don’t know the username to reset, just look in /Users with:

ls /Users/

Here you’ll see at least three items, .localized, Shared, and a username. The username is what you’ll want to change with the passwd command.
After the password is reset and confirmed, you can exit out of Single User Mode by typing exit or reboot.
That’s it. Now you can access Mac OS X with the new password. In this way you can change an Admin password in Mac OS X Single User Mode. If you found any difficulty in following the above steps then feel free to ask in the comment section below