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bjlatt

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I recently acquired an IMac G3. This unit has the previous owner's login information in place, however, they do not know their password, nor is there a system disk available. Is there any workaround to be able to access this computer?
 
Nope... if there were an easy way to circumvent an unknown password, then that sure would be crappy security! ;)

Short answer is that you either need to know the password, or have a system disk that you can boot from to reset the password.
 
Thanks for you reply. This system belonged to a friend's mother, so I guess I will hope her memory gets restored or try to find a system disk.
 
Thanks for your reply. This system belonged to a friend's mother, so I guess I will hope her memory gets restored or try to find a system disk.
 
You can buy 10.3 ("Panther) for about $30 online, I believe. It's very nice and $30 isn't bad, IMHO.

Doug
 
Be careful with this.

There are two parts to this, if you have access to the terminal prompt on another user, skip step 1.

Step 1

Single-User Mode
Another interesting modification to the startup process is booting into single-user mode. Holding down Command+S will start Mac OS X in single-user mode, allowing an administrator to directly access the system through a command-line interface. This is a last-resort method of booting your computer that should be used only if absolutely necessary.

Single-user mode boots in a text-only fashion, just like the verbose startup mode. The process finishes by dropping the user to a shell:

Caution

Be aware that the single-user mode command prompt carries with it full root access. This is not a place for playing games or learning Unix.


Step 2

http://www.intelliot.com/blog/archives/2005/02/15/mac-os-x-password-recovery/comment-page-3/
 
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