Locked out

[sundug]

A year ago, I bought on ebay a used -Apple 13" Macbook Laptop MC207LL/A (High Sierra) When I got it, it didn't ask for a password, and I never set one for it. I used the laptop intermittently over the year without signing in. Somehow, the battery ran down and now it asks for a password. I have gone thru all the usual attempts to reset the password found here- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202860 I contacted the seller, his suggestion to click unlock on the password screen did not work either, as no unlock appears. I tried my AppleID also. Any ideas? Thanks, Doug

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Yes, this is a fairly well-known intermittent issue, and can be a bear to resolve.

-Did you create the user, or did the previous owner?
-Is it starting up to the normal login screen, and asking for the password there?
-Does it give you the username with avatar and password field, or both username and password field?
-Have you ever installed anything - did you try that password?
-Or, is it prompting for a password on a gray screen?

C

 

[sundug]

Hello and welcome.

Yes, this is a fairly well-known intermittent issue, and can be a bear to resolve.

-Did you create the user, or did the previous owner? Previous Owner, but it never asked for a password before
-Is it starting up to the normal login screen, and asking for the password there? Yes
-Does it give you the username with avatar and password field, or both username and password field? I see a picture of an eagle, below that the word mac, and below that the password field
-Have you ever installed anything - did you try that password? I never put a password in, didn't need to until the battery went down
-Or, is it prompting for a password on a gray screen? Blurry background on password screen with eagle and mac as described above

C

 

[Cory Cooper]

OK, thanks.

Sorry for the delay in response.

All Macs have a password. They may be set to automatically login, which will not prompt for the password. However, if you install anything, it will always prompt for a password.

If you don't know the password, there are a few ways to reset it. Hopefully you have a current Time machine or other backup of your data, which is always recommended.

This is one way to try:
How to reset local user passwords from the macOS recovery partition

Feel free to try that, and let us know how it goes.

C