How do I reset the login password on a Mac OS X guest OS running in VMware Fusion?

Question

I installed an OS X instance inside of VMware Fusion since I needed a clean system to test some stuff on, but I've forgotten whatever login password I set for that guest OS's user account and now I don't want to have to reinstall the whole guest OS.

If this were a physical machine, I would boot into the recovery partition and launch the password utility, but I'm not sure how to do that for a guest OS in Fusion.

Solution

Hold down Cmd-S while booting to enter Single User Mode. Then follow the on-screen instructions to fsck the disk and mount it read-write. Then remove the /var/db/.AppleSetupDone file and reboot, and OS X's first time out-of-box setup assistant will run again. Create a new local admin account with a password you'll remember, and either delete the original admin account, or use the new admin account to reset the password on the old admin account, then delete the new admin account

fsck -fy /
mount -uw /
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
reboot

Comments

[Kevin Versfeld]

VMs recovery operations at the OS level are generally just like what you would do on real hardware.

[NReilingh]

@mdpc That actually was exactly what I was going for with this question--I wanted to figure out how to, say boot into recovery mode or boot from a "DVD" image that would be able to access the VM's virtual disk. But Spiff's answer still does the trick!