Comments on: Reset system keychain password

By: dan man

dan man — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:10:48 +0000

Just wanted to thank for this fix.
Havent been able to find a solution anywhere and yours worked!!!

By: Alien

Alien — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 01:31:33 +0000

I thought I’d post this here, since this page started me off. I’ve been using Timemachine to migrate re-install my Macs since I moved over a few years ago.

This time round I wanted to do a fresh re-install. I moved over my login.keychain and the System.keychain to the new install, but I could not access any of the stored passes in System.keychain. After a few hours of working on it and trying everything documented on the net that I could find, I figured it out. I could not change the pass because of the whole story that osX generates a random pass the 1st time it’s loaded and this si what is used to access System.keychain, so moving it to a new comp basically you can no longer access any of these passes, unless you manually set a pass for System.Keychain Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight in the begining. In my case it’s been a few years and I tried every pass I could think of.

Solution was to copy /var/db/SystemKey from my previous install where my System.keychain was accessible, to the same dir in the fresh install.

Problem solved. I can now access all my previously saved passes in the keychain.

This was hard info to find, and not documented anywhere. I hope it helps people who can’t live without their legacy System.keychain file when re-install a new comp from fresh.

By: Sage

Sage — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:18:19 +0000

I would love to try this but my roommie’s imac has never been backed up for the 4 years she’s had it, and I know very little about macs and she would be EXTREMELY upset with me if I tried something and lost her data. (in fact I’m quite concerned right now that if she shuts off the computer she won’t be able to get back in because we changed her admin keychain, and I read somewhere that if you do this you are screwed!) She had a LaCie backup drive in an unopened box, but when I tried to install the software to use the backup drive, it insisted on having the system password to do the installation!!! So now we can’t even backup the computer?! Help!!

By: Kunal

Kunal — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:11:19 +0000

Hi Tim

Not sure if you followed the instructions properly. Shouldn’t have happened.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:34:29 +0000

When I used this procedure it copied all the keychain login items into the keychain system folder but overwrote the existing entries so you need to copy the originals and re insert them if thats possible after you’ve finished the process

By: christina

christina — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:04:33 +0000

is this for a mac or a pc?

By: Custom Lapel Pins

Custom Lapel Pins — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:53:20 +0000

wireless password can be retrieved using the above mentioned guidelines it works.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:49:08 +0000

Thank you for the guide. I had lost my wireless password, and this let me retrieve it from Keychain.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:49:48 +0000

You are a genius. I realize how old this is, but I (like a few others apparently) just now needed it and found it. It’s so simple but so effective. You realize that even now, 3 years after you first posted this, I found no other reliable way to get into the system keychain. This is the only method that worked, and this is the only site that has this method. Great work!

By: System Keychain « candy mountain

System Keychain « candy mountain — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:51:06 +0000

[...] Reset system keychain password Posted by xsteffenx Filed in Leopard, Tech, Tiger [...]