
It ought to be the same one you just used to log in here. You can also reset your password by using your Apple ID.

In the Terminal window type resetpassword and press Enter.From the menu bar at the top, select Utilities > Terminal.

Restart your Mac while holding down the ⌘ and R keys at the same time until you see the Lion Recovery screen.One of them allows you to reset your Mac’s password: This may not always work, in which case you have two other options.If you bought a brand new Mac with Lion pre-installed, it includes a recovery partition with various system recovery tools. Hold down Command-R at startup (Option by itself won’t work on a FileVault-protected Mac), and then erase the FileVault partition using Disk Utility, and then reinstall macOS. (Rich Trouton wrote up an extensive blog entry on the recovery process in 2015 that remains valuable.)Įrase via Recovery. Apple has full instructions at the bottom of this page, but it requires that you either cached your password in iCloud-which doesn’t work for another party who doesn’t have access to your account-or the person who enabled FileVault created a recovery key that they can provide to you. If you don’t have a valid password, you can try to recover one. However, each email I’ve received sounded fully plausible, and most had personal details attached.)


(Now if I were suspicious, I’d wonder if the emails I’ve received were from people who had obtained systems illegitimately, and were trying to crack into them or reformat a system that they’d potentially obtained through another party who might not have had full authority to give it to them. You can recover a lost FileVault password or erase a FileVault drive, losing everything but regaining the ability to use the system.
