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I was working on increasing the speed of an ancient (6 years old) iMac running Leopard when I accidentally set the password incorrectly. I then turned to the internet to look for an answer and found: http://www.macyourself.com/2009/08/03/how-to-reset-your-mac-os-x-password-without-an-installer-disc/ Which seemed to work fine until I reached 

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist

Which returned the error 

launch_msg socket is not connected

I decided to ignore this and see where this would lead me, when I got to:

dscl . -passwd /Users/username password

It told me that I had to run:

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServicesLocal.plist

which returned the same error.

Additionally the system is very slow despite Activity Monitor telling me no programs are using more then 2% cpu or 50 mb ram. Could this be connected?

It's also worth noting that the disc reader was damaged some time ago and is useless.

Anyone got a fix?

Thijser
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  • Since you successfully hacked your own mac, how about making new account. – Ruskes Aug 07 '13 at 11:56
  • I'm a bit hesitant to close this as a duplicate now that you have added a bounty, but http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/61905/how-can-i-reset-a-macs-password-from-single-user-mode looks rather similar. – nohillside Aug 09 '13 at 13:41
  • I tried that but I keep getting the socket error so it's not really the same. (it comes down to the same as the link I followed originally tried it the same but that didn't work). – Thijser Aug 11 '13 at 10:05

2 Answers2

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The above worked on osx 10.5.8

I didn't use the "/" in mount -uw and once I did that it let me reset the password

Working command: mount -uw /

Jack B
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Did you follow the instructions exactly? I had the same problem, until I realized that I had omitted the / at the end of mount -uw /.

Can't comment on slowness or damaged hardware, that seems unrelated.

Uli Klumpp
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