My admin password stopped working. Can't restart in recovery and tried terminal but need more specific guidance there. Am operating macbook from external drive

My macbook pro admin password has stopped working.  Can't start it in recovery mode and am having no success with terminal command although I could do with more in depth instruction on that.  Have been operating it from an external drive (Yosemite) for 3 months after a stuck reinstall of mavericks and it was working fine till last week.  I am currently downloading another copy of Yosemite with a view to trying to install it on my internal hard drive which has been erased.  Help

Hey JustSomeGuy,
Thanks for the response. It is the external drive that has the data I need to keep. Reboot did not do it...
What I did get done just now is going into Safe Mode and delete the problematic files there and Empty Trash. That worked - so one step closer hopefully. I did not do the .DS Store files (will do that after done writing this).
How do I do a copy with cp rather than the finder?
Repair permissions is grayed out in DiskUtil - I did do a Disk Repair in Safe Mode and that turned up without error. However, now back in normal mode - Disk Repair gives an error again saying that the drive cannot be unmounted.
Thanks for the help so far.
Cheers

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