I have a 1st-gen MacBook Air. It came with, if I remember correctly, Leopard. I subsequently upgraded to Snow Leopard and then to Lion.
However, I have found it to be very sluggish after upgrading to Lion, so I decided to downgrade it to Snow Leopard.
Since doing so, I can no longer log in.
Here's what I did
- Use SuperDuper! to make a bootable backup of my MacBook Air hard drive on a partition on an external USB hard drive
- Boot using the aforementioned partition on external USB hard drive as startup disk to verify the clone. Verified.
- On another Mac (one with a DVD drive), use SuperDuper! to clone the Mac OS X Snow Leopard install DVD onto another partition onto the same external USB hard drive.
- On the MacBook Air, boot into the Install partition on the external drive.
- Use Disk Utility to re-partition the MacBook Air's internal hard drive.
- Install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on the MacBook Air's hard drive
- When asked as part of the installation, choose to migrate users, applications and data from the other partition on the same external hard drive that contained the previously backed up hard drive
- Restart the MacBook Air on successful installation
- Attempt to log in with the password I originally had.
The login screen simply shakes its head at me and does not let me log in.
With my limited knowledge, I imagine that something has gone awry with password hashing. Any ideas what I can do?
Best Answer
You may want to try the method described here under 'Reset Mac Password – without a CD'. This method resets the OS so that it thinks that it's the first time it's been run. This will kick off the Create New User Account wizard when the OS is rebooted, which allows you to create a new account with Administrator rights. You can then use this account to reset the password of the original account.
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