Locked out of Administrator's Account by Parental Controls

[Itv]

locked out of administrator account

Thank you all for your help...it was actually fun - including the intrigue. I'm grateful you're all here to help us newbies and computer illiterate folk.

Solution:
I simply logged out of the account I was in (which has always been my Admin Acct.) and logged into the Test Acct (which had somehow become the Admin Acct.). From there, I simply switched off PC for all the Users and I was back to normal. It was thanks to all of your posts that I read and reread - especially the one about not being able to apply PC to an Admin Acct, etc. It made me go back and have a good look at everything.

Hi there,
This is amazing. I had exactely same problem! MBP 2010, OS 10.7.5 (what is it?? ..Lion?..Giraffe?..Elefant..can't keep up with all the animals names..) Anyway, I felt a lot of sympathy as I was in the same position trying to do the responsible thing as a parent. After couple of hr searching on the web and reading this thread I came up with the following solution that to my surprise was super easy:
Solution no.2:
I noticed that my account changed to "managed" and my husband changed to "administrator" I simply typed in his user name with MY administrator password which i originally set up as it is my personal MBP and it worked!! The computer was unlocked and i managed from his account to disable parental control and return myself to the administer position again.
Shockingly simple and unexpected compare to all the other suggestion I was reading about. I hope it work for the next parent who locks himself out.
why apple don't give you any warning about this before PC setup?? Hunestly, such a pain.

 

[PowerPCMacMan]

The best way to reset the Admin Account would be to pop in the Mac OS X install disc. Then choose reset password. Its that simple.

 

[thatdesigner]

Same issues...

I was helping out a friend of mine as her kids were watching youtube (minecraft) all of the time. So I was looking at ways to block youtube.. initially it was a choice of plugins across all browsers but I tried parental controls as that's one place, easy. Or so I thought.

I set the account to parental controls which turned off all admin rights to the account and locked the system preferences pane so I couldn't make any more changes or reverse the parental controls.

There's now a strange admin account on the machine called 'install' I'm not sure if that was there before or it's been added as a safeguard, either way I now can't administer the computer to turn off these parental controls..

Any definitive answers to this issue? I'm surprised Apple would allow something as simple as this to happen without a fall back.

 

[that salad]

reboot machine.

old down cmd + s to boot into single user mode.
at the prompt, type these three lines in order and hit return at the end of each line:

mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

reboot

Tthe mac will then take you through the initial setup of the system. just skip through everything until you reach the create an account page, create a new account named anything but your current account name. follow the rest of the setup until you reach the desktop. then open system prefs, unlock parental controls and assign admin rights to your old account. then you can log back into your old account and delete the newly created one

 

[AnthonyJ]

Hold down the OPTION key when you hear the chime

You should see 2 'hard drives'

One labelled 'Recovery' - click it and allow it to boot

Then from the Utilities menu up the top, open Terminal

In Terminal type 'resetpassword' and press enter

You'll get a dialog box where you can select the user accounts and reset the passwords

The recovery partition was created in OS X 10.8/9/10 automatically. This is to allow internet recovery of the operating system.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/24/reset-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-password/

 

[LaraIngalls]

The part that makes it tough to believe is that it is hard for an admin to inflicted this diminished capacities on itself. Independently the scratched DVD is believable. If a kid was creating a context to solicit help bypassing parental controls it would go very much like this one.

Go to Applications > Utilities and open Terminal application.

At the prompt type:

ls -l /Users/

Should get something like

drwx .......... Shared
drwx .......... username1
drwx ........... username2

where Username are the names of the accounts on the machine. "Shared" isn't an account. For each of those names type

groups username1

where 'username1' is the user names. That will spit out a list of groups. If see something like 'admin' or 'lp_admin' then that account is an administrator account.

If there are no accounts that are a member of admin then that whole instance is screwed. If one of your boys has an admin account then have him login and then take the computer away.

Turn off parental controls on your account ( Sys Prefs > Parental controls )

Turn your account back to an admin account. ( Sys Prefs > Accounts )

logout. Login to your account.

Turn off admin privileges for boys accounts
Turn on parental controls on those standard accounts.

This worked, thanks. And just for your information, guys, I am a 45 year old IT consultant, and the same exact thing happened to me. I wanted to turn on Parental Controls. I was an Admin User. And, with no warning message at all, suddenly I was a 'Managed' user, and I couldn't do a thing. Fortunately, I had recently had to create a Test User Admin for Apple Support - and, luckily, I recalled its password. So I was able to switch off Parental Controls, return my user to Admin, and proceed.

And this is 2015. And this was on a 2012 MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite 10.10.2. So... this issue has still not been rectified.