April 14th, 2020 · 1 min read
This may not work if you’re using a new(er) machine with T2 security chip or having FileVault enabled. The one I was dealing with was an old MacBook Pro (Early 2011) running Lion.
Story time! A family member asked me to help with her old MBP (Early 2011). It was running Lion (!) and she couldn’t watch YouTube because the browser was no longer supported. She wanted to upgrade her OS but she didn’t know her admin password. (1/6)
Apparently her laptop was set up by someone else & that someone turned on Automatic Login. For 9 yrs she’s been using her computer without ever having to enter her admin password. She didn’t even remember who helped her set it up in the 1st place. (2/6)
How to reset the password without even knowing the current one? There’s a support article for that: Apple support article. Unfortunately, she had no Apple ID set up and FileVault turned off. (3/6)
Creating a new admin account using System Preferences wasn’t an option either because she couldn’t unlock the Users & Groups pane: Create a new admin account (4/6)
The solution was to boot into Single User Mode and remove AppleSetupDone to force the machine to re-run Setup Assistant of course: How to re-run the OS X Setup Assistant. She then created a new Admin account, log in to it and reset the other account’s password. (5/6)
She lost access to her old keychain, but all other data was there. Once again, Single User Mode saved the day. (6/6)