OSX won't recognize my password for admin rights

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Alright, I think I may have messed up a bit here. To be perfectly honest, I was curious about the difference between a regular user and admin account, so what I did was, rather than create a basic user account, I turned my admin one into a regular user account. That was probably a mistake.

So now, in trying to make my account an admin one again, when I go to try and unlock and after the prompt to put in a username and password, it won't recognize the password even though it is correct. I do understand that it may not be working since I dubbed my account a standard one and that my name is no longer associated with an admin account anymore, but I also have my wife's account setup as admin, and that's of no use either.

I went into her account, tried to change mine from her side, but I can't even highlight my standard account from her side, which I don't get. The other thing is that when I do anything which then prompts OS X to have me enter an admin name and password (for some reason Yahoo IM needs me to allow incoming connections every time I open it, even though I set that to be allowed in firewall settings), all I have to do is cancel the prompt and it works just fine. Seems redundant and stupid.

Is there anything I can do to restore or fix what I did, or will I have to re-install OS X ?

Doug
 
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If you have the original Black install disk, you can reset the password. It will want ot install OS X but go back and when the menu bar appears at the top, reset password is there I believe.
 

dtravis7


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On your Wife's account, if you open System Preferences, Accounts, click on the locked padlock at the bottom left. It will want her username and password and should unlock. Then you would be able to make your account an Admin one again. I just tried it here as I have a limited account on my system for testing purposes and it worked.

With that Padlock locked, all the other accounts will be grayed out.


Hope that helps.
 
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on snow leopard 10.6, this worked for me:

If all users are listed as 'standard' in their permissions, you need to use system administrator (root) to log in. Read up on root before you do this, but, for me, I restarted the computer with the Snow Leopard disk, selected repair permissions, changed the password of root, shut down, restarted, logged in as root and upgraded my original user account to admin.
 

chscag

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You replied to a post well over 1.5 years old. Please take note of the date of the thread before replying. And yes, establishing a "root" log in will solve that problem but is not recommended. The best way to resolve that was given by dtravis7.
 
OP
Doug b
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Wow. I completely forgot about that post... Thanks?

D
 

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