Correct Password not working

[jbuckleywa]

I'm at my wits end here, I came home and woke my Mac from sleep and it wouldn't accept my password. I am absolutely 100% sure it's the correct password but I tried differnet variants to no avail. So I reached around and powered it off and back on to see if that fixed it. Now it says Name/Password where before it had my username as a clickable picture. I tried what I'm pretty sure is my shortname for the account and it's still not working. I booted into recovery mode to do the 'resetpassword' via Terminal method but even that isn't working because no disks showed up in the box. I have a working backup from last night that I can restore from but that's a couple hours I'd rather not waste if there's some obvious solution staring me in the face. Anyone have any ideas for what's going on?

 

[Brookzy]

Can you reset your password using your Apple ID? If you have that enabled then it gives you the option after three or four failed attempts.

 

[MarcoTogni]

It happened to me one time, I found the problem was that the Apple keyboard suddenly was "broken" and didn't type the letters correctly.
Please try to write your password in the "username" field so you can be 100% sure the keyboard is working well.
Probably mine is stupid advice, but I needed quite long to realize the problem was the keyboard.

 

[Fishrrman]

To expand on Marco's suggestion above, open Text Edit and type in your username and password.
Are they correct? (regarding upper/lower case, etc.)?

If you're having trouble remembering them, write them down somewhere!

 

[SackJabbit]

I, too, encountered the same problem a few times in the past logging into my MacBook at start-up or restarting. It indicated my password was incorrect, but I was confident my password was correct. Rebooting seemed to resolve the issue.

Then, one time, I noticed the Caps Lock key was lit after successfully logging in with that same password. I thought, that's strange, but it planted an idea perhaps my Caps Lock key was buggy. Subsequently, on several random occasions over the years, when my password wasn't accepted, I tried to toggle the Caps Lock key to enable the light on, and that solved the problem. So, on those occasions, the Caps Lock key would be the opposite, ie. light on = Caps Lock off, light off = Caps Lock on.

The reverse Caps Lock key issue may have occurred when I have my finger resting on the Caps Lock key upon restarting or booting up, or...... it had been more likely that during restarting, I often wipe my keyboard with a cleaning cloth and the Caps Lock key gets a few times (don't ask me why, but I clean my keyboard only at shut down, starting up or rebooting, lol ). The good thing is, after logging into macOS, the Caps Lock key resets itself and the light switches back to default.

So perhaps, MarcoTogni may be right to say it's keyboard or individual keys-related. If you have a wired keyboard, try plugging that in your iMac and see if that may work.

 

[Fishrrman]

I disable the caps lock key on all my Macs (using the keyboard preference pane).

Never used it, anyway.