Macbook: What to do if you accidentally remove your admin privileges on Mac OSX 10.5.6

I was a mac noob and I had a problem, neither iCal or Address book will open for me at all. (Which is still the case by the way so any suggestions there appreciated). It was while trying to figure this one out that I accidentally removed my own admin privileges. This prevented from running a lot of apps or accessing my own documents. TOTAL DISASTER! So I did what anyone would do and I asked twitter IT support. It no time flat (less than 2 mins) James Foley aka @robinbanks emailed me the answer.

Apparently he had the experience himself a while back and the guys in CompuB helped him out. I seems it’s a “pay it forward” kind of thing. So I felt it only right that I “pay it forward” as well and record it for any other Noobs like me who mess it up.

These are exact instructions and they worked but I take NO responsibility for any damage you do. You decide to do this at you own risk…

First reboot your machine…

Hold down command and s while the system is rebooting (don’t panic when you see all the white text on black flashing by, it’s meant to look like that)

At the prompt (you may have to hit return once to bring up the prompt) type the following:

/sbin/mount -uw / Then hit return

passwd Then hit return

It should then prompt you to enter a new password

yournewpassword (obviously you should just pick your own here) Then hit return

It’ll then ask you to confirm

yournewpassword Then hit return. Then type:

reboot Then hit return

The machine should now reboot and when you’re prompted for an admin account you can type in “root” as the username and whatever your new password you selected is. Then you can change your own account back to being an admin and stop panicking about all the work you haven’t backed up.

I hope that’s of help to you as you wind your way through life and if you have any suggestions regarding the problem I was originally trying to solve they’d be appreciated.