Password prompt on logon screen

C

cahalsall

Registered
Hi to everyone,

A friend of mine, in the process of trying to disable his guess account, has modified the the logon screen. The modification has removed the password prompt from the logon screen. The main user and the guess icons still appear but clicking on them does not bring up the password prompt.

This is quite frustrating for him and now for me. To make it worst the last operating system upgrade was done online. There is no CD to boot from.

I would reall appreciate any assistance on this; hopefully one that will not include installing a previous operating system.

Thanks in advance for any assistance on this matter.

Charles
 
What, precisely, did they do to "modify the logon screen?" Is it possible simply to "undo" whatever they did?

If you can be more specific about exactly how they tried to modify the logon screen, we may be able to point you in a more specific direction.
 
Sounds like your friend upgraded to Lion, so the reinstall is simple.
Restart, while holding Command-R, which will boot your friend's Mac to the Lion Recovery partition. The menu that appears will provide you with the choice to reinstall Lion.
 
El Diablo, Thanks for your reply. I wouldn't know where to start, I was not present when he tried to delete his guest account.

As to the undo part, I'm afraid you would have to login to do that. I will try DeltaMac's option later. I Have not been around too many Intel Macs and I'm not too exited about them. If you check out one of my older post you will understand why.

I realy do hope that Apple keeps it's options open and one day give us the ability to choose between Intel and maybe, let's say, the Cell processor.
 
Dear friends, I'm back to square one. I had Omar go through the reinstall procedure. I told him to start the download and I would pass by later to assist. After the download completed he went ahead and reinstalled the operating system only to call me later to say that the login screen remained the same; no password prompt.

I'm having some serious problems with two things here; first an average user should not have been able to modify the login screen to the point of making it unusable and second; Why couldn't the reinstall start right away. After all Lion had been downloaded already.

It is obvious that another reinstall may not solve this problem so lets see if someone else had been through this and can help us.

As was mentioned before, the problem started when Omar tried to remove his guest account (please don't ask me why he just didn't disable it, I wasn't there). The machine is a two year old Mac Pro. I do not have the details on the specs but that should not be a problem. This is a system software problem. What I need to figure out is how to get the password prompt back on the login screen.

Might there be a way to fix this from the command prompt? I will try to ssh into the machine later this evening to copy some important files to his portable computer.

Thanks again in advance for any assistance.
 
You'll likely need to try deleting the various login.plist files
Delete these files:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
and
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist.lockfile
and
/Library/preferences/Loginwindow.plist
/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist.lockfile

You may have to provide the admin password to move those files to the trash. Empty the trash as the last step, then restart the Mac. Should reboot to the default login window.
Change the system settings for your desired login in the System Preferences (NOT by trying to modify one of the system files manually)
I know you didn't actually do that yourself, but you can "put the fear" into your friend, who (one would hope) has perhaps learned something, eh?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top