I’ve gotten a couple of questions about this and don’t remember where I posted it previously, so here goes again. If you forget a local admin password in OS X and you have physical access to the machine then unless you’re using full disk encryption or firmware passwords (and know those passwords) you can reset the password. To do so boot the computer or server from your recovery partition using Command-R at boot (or Option and then selecting the recovery partition). At the Recovery Desktop open Terminal from the Utilities menu. From terminal use the following command: resetpassword When the Reset Password window appears, choose the volume you’d like to reset an account…
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Reset the Admin or Root Password in Mac OS X
Forgot the admin password in Mac OS X? Well, Apple let’s you boot computers into what is known as Single User Mode. To boot a Mac into Single User Mode, boot the machine holding down Command-S. Once the system boots up, you should see a command prompt. Here, run fsck: fsck -fy Then mount the file system: mount -uw / Then reset the password using the passed command passwd <username> For example, if the user is root: passwd root When prompted, provide the desired administrative password.