Mac Book Air need to wipe

I bought my daughter a Macbook Air on Ebay great machine

Running Sierra 10.2.3

My daughter has lost her Admin password and needs to make some changes so i guess i need to do a fresh install of OS and loose what i have.

Is this possible with out Admin pass word.

I called the company that sold it to me and they gave me a password they thought would work but no luck...

Any help would be appreciated

You don't need to do a fresh install to recover the password. Please follow along the instructions here and you can reset the password for the Admin account.

Once that is done, and if you are using the machine the way it was when you bought it from another user and they didn't do a clean install you really owe it to yourself to do that. So go to Mac App Store and "purchase" a copy of macOS Sierra and use DiskmakerX to create a bootable USB with the installer and then go through the process of doing a fresh install..

Will this work for 10.2.3 ?

I am n Disk Utility from Recovery but can not find the menue to find terminal >

First, the version number for Sierra is 10.12.3 not 10.2.3.

When in Recovery, select utilities, then select terminal.

I do have a 10.6.3 disk can i use this ..Happt to loose all data

Rooeey1966 said:

I do have a 10.6.3 disk can i use this ..Happt to loose all data

Click to expand...

Does that MacBook Air even have an optical drive? You never told us which year and model it was? In any event, if the machine came with Sierra as the original install or any other version of OS X later than 10.6.3, the 10.6.3 disk will not work.

Go to the Apple menu (upper left corner) and click on it. Then select "About This Mac" and paste that into your reply. That will tell us which machine she has.

No optical drive but i do have an external drive

It was only loaded with 10.2

ok so its a mac book air 13" loaded with 10.2.3 about 2010..
I can not find my ebay receipt as deleted from purchased file so Mac Store wont help..The company MD computers i purchased from claim the employee tha deakt with this *** moved on and cant be found and i can not get this machine to start up from 10.6.3 disc via superdrive..Close to taking the hammer to this machine now

How much did you pay for it, just as a point of interest? It will give us an idea how much effort you should put into getting it up and running.
Also can you confirm the year of manufacture? In About this Mac under the Apple Menu.
The good news is that the 2010 model MacBook Air can run the latest macOS 10.12 (Sierra). The bad news is that there are several ways of resetting the admin password (or creating a new one) all of which are a little difficult and vary dependent on which Operating System you have installed.

So you may want to try this method. This creates a new administrator account (for which you can set your own chosen password) and allows you to delete the old admin password.
Solution

Here is the best and easiest way to reset your OS X password without an OS X CD.

The solution for me was to create a new admin; you can create a new admin like this by deleting a specific file. You need to open terminal and create an administrator account:
Reboot

Hold simultaneously Apple + s down after you hear the chime.

When you get the command prompt (Terminal) enter the following commands to create a new account as administrator (hitting return after each line):

mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

shutdown -h now

After rebooting you might have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you may delete the old one and you're good to go again!

This was a method which worked with macOS 10.4 so make sure you enter the commands EXACTLY and give it a try. You would probably pay a Tech. anything up to $100.00 to do this.

It will mean that you will not have access to the old admin account and it is assumed you will delete it. No offence meant but I hope you understand that both we and Apple are bound morally and legally not to allow people to crack used computers. Without proof of ownership for all we know this may be a stolen device or you may want to access someone else's computer files without their password.

I understand what you are saying about proof of ownership etc and agree 100%.

Ebay emailed me with all the details but no nvoice as its over 60 days ago so i am waitig for MD Computers of Brisbane Aust to send me a copy of my invoive.

Machine cost me $AU 800.00 its a Mid 2013 i5 13" Mac Book Air A1466 running 10.2.3.

Thanks Rod

Yous say hold down apple+ s but there is no apple key

Tried the cmd + s and got a screen message error building user type and straight back to MD computers log in

OS X.2 would not install on a MBA. Be assured it will be OS X.12.3 Rod. Do what the other Rod suggests in Terminal. Note it needs to be entered precisely as he set out ~ spaces, periods, hyphens etc and entering return following each line. You might like to print this page to be doubly sure of getting it right. As an aside, Rod is from Melbourne, but do not hold that against him too much! The last Cane Toad we had here always referred to himself as coming from Brisvegas!

An external optical drive will not boot from Snow Leopard ~ no drivers installed for it. As a rule of thumb you can not go back to older operating systems that were released before the Mac was sold new.

No command prompt for terminal just error rebuilding message...
Looks like i will have to go to apple store next week if i can get an invoice..

Try to start up into Internet Recovery, hold "command+option+R" after you turn the MBA on.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

Will no start in recovery either...

I found my Paypal receipt so i will go to Apple store and get it wiped clean for a fresh start.

Well, I'm really glad you have found that. It is as usual very difficult sometimes to ensure that instructions that we give are followed to the letter. It is also impossible to cover all of the variables related to how a specific machine might respond to a set of commands. I'm sure you have done your best so don't despair. The price you paid is reasonable assuming the device is not damaged in any way. It should give years of good service once set up.
Just one word of advice, when you get it back from Apple it should start up with the Setup Wizard running. This will run you through all of the steps necessary to make this laptop your daughter's device. Please do not skip any steps, ensure that she sets up an Apple account which if she already has one should be the same, with the same password and user name (just in case she has an iPhone) as her iTunes account (if she has one). One Apple ID covers everything Apple.
Do not encrypt the hard drive. This is an option provided at setup and is entirely unnecessary often causing problems down the line.
Do use the option to retrieve admin password using Apple ID and ensure the Apple ID user name and password are kept in a safe place.
As always if you have any questions please feel free to contact this Forum and we would love to hear back from you after your trip to Apple.

I appreciate all the help i have been offered by the good people of this forum who are all ways help full and have saved me a fortune over the years.

I will let you know how i go with Apple on Sunday..