Saturday, May 20, 2006

How To: Reset 'root' password on Mac OS X

I purchased my Apple PowerBook G4 a year off eBay. I got a really good deal for it and saved around $500 on the retail price and it was only 4 months old. Anyway, the lady I purchased it off gave me an 'administrator' password which I thought would also be the 'root' account password. To my surprise it was not, and today when I was trying to install FlightGear on my PowerBook I could not since I did not have permission! So a little search on Google was useful because I learned that I can reset it without having to restore my machine and lose my stuff (no isn't porn!). It was real easy:
  1. Pop in the restore CD/DVD
  2. Restart the machine
  3. Follow the re-installation until you can access the menu
  4. Choose the 'reset password' option
  5. From there you can reset any password including the 'root' account
That's it, now I have access to my 'root' account. Thanks to my infinite wisdom I decided to restore while maintaining my files (another option available) and then found out that I lost all the Unix tools available including 'gcc' and 'make' and now I cannot compile and install FlightGear. All of this to install the damn flight simulator! I guess it was not meant to be.

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