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dogger20011

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 21, 2014
9
0
I would like to retrieve the root password for this machine running OS X 10.7.5. I do not want to reset the password, but actually get the password itself. I am on a Admin account and have access to Single User Mode. How would I go about doing this?
 
Have you enabled the root user? By default access to the root user account is disabled and only allowed once a password has been created for the account. Why do you want to access or recover the root user account?
 
Changing/resetting the root account password is fairly trivial, particularly with Lion and newer OS X versions.
Retrieving the actual password is not, and the root password may not even be possible without some kind of cracking technique, beyond what this site will provide.

I would ask a similar question -
Why do you need access to the root user, but don't want to change the password to do that?
 
I would ask a similar question -
Why do you need access to the root user, but don't want to change the password to do that?

It's explained by his other thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1767429/

Basically, if he resets the password, his school's IT admins will find out when he returns the machine, and he may get in trouble. So he needs to discover the password rather than reset it, so he can use it without anyone knowing he tinkered too much.
 
Have you enabled the root user? By default access to the root user account is disabled and only allowed once a password has been created for the account. Why do you want to access or recover the root user account?
Yes, the root account has been enabled. I've tried using DaveGrohl to get the hash, but I get a Did Not Understand ShadowHashData error. Have any ideas?
 
I saw your other thread about not being able to set the boot drive for startup, so you can't boot to the internal drive.

You said that there is a firmware password - which will prevent you from booting to anything else.
Is that fixed now, so you can boot to the hard drive?

If that's still the issue, I wonder why you think the root password will help you...
 
I saw your other thread about not being able to set the boot drive for startup, so you can't boot to the internal drive.

You said that there is a firmware password - which will prevent you from booting to anything else.
Is that fixed now, so you can boot to the hard drive?

If that's still the issue, I wonder why you think the root password will help you...
Yes that is fixed, I can boot up into the OS and login to my admin account. I can also use a boot argument in terminal to boot into Single User Mode if necessary.
 
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