Computer name and password problem

[SteveCopper]

I have a new MacBook Air that I just restarted and instead of my account login window appearing a grey screen came up with the Apple symbol and a dialogue box for name (not user name) and another for password. It is not accepting my account user name and password. I also tried leaving the boxes blank and hitting return, but that was also wrong. I don't think I set a name and password other than what I used for the account. Can any tell what I am doing wrong? Thanks.

 

[JediMeister]

The behavior of the login window can be changed to show fields for a username and password instead of a list of users. The username field will only accept the short name for the user account, it will not accept your full name. You can try your first initial and last name all in lowercase with no spaces. If that doesn't work, maybe someone with know-how in single user mode can give you the command line to show your short name.

If you can log in, to change the login window back to the default behavior, go to Users & Groups preferences, unlock the preference pane, then click Login Options and click the radio button next to "List of users."

 

[ezramoore]

You can try your first initial and last name all in lowercase with no spaces.

I think OS X defaults the short name/account name to full firstnamelastname format.

 

[Mal]

The behavior of the login window can be changed to show fields for a username and password instead of a list of users. The username field will only accept the short name for the user account, it will not accept your full name. You can try your first initial and last name all in lowercase with no spaces. If that doesn't work, maybe someone with know-how in single user mode can give you the command line to show your short name.

If you can log in, to change the login window back to the default behavior, go to Users & Groups preferences, unlock the preference pane, then click Login Options and click the radio button next to "List of users."

The Login window will accept the full name or short name. The short name by default is the full name without spaces, capitalization, or punctuation. However, before anyone else makes this more of a mystery, there's an easy way to find out what your short name is:

It's the name of your Home folder (in /Users/).

Thus, if you're locked out of the system and can't boot, you only have to boot into Single User Mode (hold Cmd-S during startup) and run the following two commands:

mount -uw /
ls /Users

That will display a list of all the short usernames on the system, because the home folder for each user is named by that account's short name.

That said, there's a better way to approach the problem for the OP. Boot off the Recovery Partition (hold Cmd-R at startup) and choose Terminal from the Utilities menu. Type "resetpassword" without the quotes and hit enter. Select your hard drive, then the user account from the drop-down menu, and enter a new password. The only thing that will be lost is the Keychain passwords, so hopefully you remember all your online passwords.

jW

 

[ezramoore]

Once in a while you get a great reply like this ^.

Also, you didn't say if you had tried entering your username and no password.

The info that mal gave you will absolutely fix the problem.