charles 2 October 2025

I was recently re-purposing an old Macbook Pro (2012) which was originally purchased through a school district. I installed a new SSD and booted from an external boot disk, then downloaded and installed Mac OSX 10.14 Mojave on the new drive. After restarting, I went through the setup and a window popped-up stating that the machine could be remotely managed by the school district. I had completely forgotten where it came from (this is 2025), so this was a bit of a surprise. Since I've been using it for 13 years, I figured I would be unlikely to encounter any issues going forward, so I completed the setup.

Unexpectedly, I never received a prompt to create any user accounts. Instead, an "admin" account was automatically created with a password that I failed to guess after three or four attempts. I assume this was part of the "remote management" aspect of the deal. I looked around for a solution, but failed to find something simple & straightforward until I stumbled on the following from nordpass.com.

  1. Power down the computer
  2. Boot into Recovery Mode by holding ⌘+R while pressing the power button
  3. From the "Utilities" menu, select "Terminal"
  4. At the shell prompt, enter the following:
    # resetpassword
  5. Choose the account you want to reset

From here, I was able to enter a new password, then login to the admin account and setup my other user accounts. I originally tried booting into single-user mode (⌘+U), but had no luck. Might have been user error, but in any case the preceding method did the trick.

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