How to Find Your Mac Login If You’ve Forgotten It
While most people set up their Macs so that all they need is a password or finger press to authenticate to their machines, the computer your company gives you might be a little more restrictive. Instead of allowing you to save your login or display a list of users on your system, for example, you may need to enter your account name and password.
This is great for security, but not so good if you’ve forgotten your username (for whatever reason) on your work Mac or MacBook that you’ve previously set up and haven’t used for a long time.
If your company allows you, or if you want to make life easier for your personal Mac, it’s easy to switch to a login method that only asks for your password: go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Options and make sure your login window is set up. as “User List” instead of “Username and Password”.
However, this is of little use if you can’t even log into your system because you forgot your username. But don’t worry. There is a little trick you can use to figure this out.
Restart your Mac first. During boot, hold Command + R keys until it boots into recovery mode . In recovery mode, ignore everything in the window you are looking at and click “Utilities” on the top menu bar. Then click on Terminal. In terminal type resetpassword and press Enter.
Follow the prompts as if you’ve forgotten your password, and you should soon see a list of different accounts that you can use to log into your computer. This will most likely be a single account on your personal Mac, or multiple accounts on a corporate Mac, depending on how your company set it up.
As we already reported , you can also use this trick to reset your password, as you probably guessed if you forgot that too. This only works for systems that were not encrypted with FileVault. If you have, or want to explore a few other password reset options, Apple has an excellent FAQ about this on their support site.
Generally speaking, if this is a work laptop and you have a network account that you use to log in, you may also need to reset your password through our friendly IT support system. But if that’s the case, you should probably already know your work username and password – unless you’ve just returned from a month-long beach vacation or something similar.