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I have bought a MacBook Pro, and I'm having problems with those passwords.

How can I disable them completely?

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Which passwords exactly? Is there a user account you don't know the password of? Does the Mac have a firmware password enabled that you want to remove? Are you talking about a FileVault password? Please edit your question and add some details. We really have no idea what you're talking about. –  slhck Dec 12 '11 at 23:21
Thank you for your replay :) Its start up password for user, I have been loking how can I turn it off. –  mario Dec 12 '11 at 23:28
my english is bit rusty sorry :) –  mario Dec 12 '11 at 23:36

1 Answer 1

There are two methods according to OS X Daily.

I don't have a 10.7 machine to try but I would assume they work fine.

Plain password reset

Reboot your Mac and hold the Option key. Wait for the menu and select "Recovery". Here, wait until you see the Mac OS X Utilities dialog. At the top, select Utilities → Terminal.

Here, type in the following and press Enter afterwards.


This is pretty straightforward.

Making the Mac forget it's been set up

Do the same as above, where you boot into the Recovery disk. Select Utilities → Terminal again. Then, enter the following:

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

After that, enter


Your Mac will now think it's been freshly unpacked. You can create a new administrator account through the steps here. For example, call it "temp". Once you're done with the setup, you can log into your new account.

Then, open System Preferences → Users and Groups. Click the lock to authenticate. From the user list on the left side, click the account you didn't know the password of. Here, click "Reset Password".

Once you're done, you can log out from your "temp" user, and log into the other user again.

You can even remove the "temp" user by going to Users and Groups preferences from the original user account and deleting it from there.

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Of course, if it's a machine you bought, you might want to consider just reinstalling the complete system, wiping everything before. –  slhck Dec 12 '11 at 23:55

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