My first Mac OSX woe

I've been using OSX on my laptop and on an iMac since it first came out. Up until last night, I've had zero complaints. Things run smoothly, no crashes, no Blue Screen of Death, it's been compatible with my printers, window's network, etc.

Unfortunately, last night I found my first fly in the ointment. It was pretty late and I planned to watch a new episode of Lost in iTunes on my PowerMac G4. When I logged in though, the password box just shook its head at me, denying me access. No caps lock on, must've typed it wrong. I tried several more times to no avail. Finally it asked me for my master password which it accepted, prompting me to change the password for my user account.

Ok, no harm, no foul - except that it continually rejected every attempt to set a new password. Complex, simple, used, unused... everything I tried failed. It looked like I was locked out.

Fortunately, internet to the rescue. Searching the web I came across this simple trick to accessing a locked mac:

Restart your computer, hold down Command-S and type in the following:

/sbin/fsck -y [Enter]
/sbin/mount -uaw [Enter]
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone [Enter]
reboot [Enter]

I was taken through the "new user" part of OSX's install process and setup a new admin user. When I got into OSX with this user, I opened the control panel and saw my old user account was still there, but I was STILL unable to edit the password for some reason (yes, I clicked the unlock icon.) What the heck??

Finally, brushing off some old unix/linux skills I opened up terminal and executed a passwd [username] command and logged out, praying that that did the trick. It did, and I was finally able to enjoy Lost. (Nice hippy van, Hurley!)