OS X Passwords

I recently bought an ibook G3 700MHz on ebay. When i recieved it it seemed to be working fine but no OS X disks were supplied with it and no administrator or user passwords. It would automaticaally login to one of the user accounts. I have emailed the person i bought it from but with no joy. So, looking in the OSX help files the advice was to boot from an OS X install disc and reset the passwords.
I did this using a friends install diks from an ibook G4 1.2Ghz and now all the user accounts appear to have disappeared and i can no longer log on. Anyone have any advice what I can do to get logged on again

malkyr said:

I recently bought an ibook G3 700MHz on ebay. When i recieved it it seemed to be working fine but no OS X disks were supplied with it and no administrator or user passwords. It would automaticaally login to one of the user accounts. I have emailed the person i bought it from but with no joy. So, looking in the OSX help files the advice was to boot from an OS X install disc and reset the passwords.
I did this using a friends install diks from an ibook G4 1.2Ghz and now all the user accounts appear to have disappeared and i can no longer log on. Anyone have any advice what I can do to get logged on again

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I think your iBook supports the boot up in os 9. try to boot from os 9 CD. it will ignore the user access restrictions that you have in os X. if your files are still on the hard drive they will show up. back them up and erase the iBook. reinstall the system, make your own passwords and accounts.
try and let me know what happens
good luck

Are you sure that it booted from the discs? Usually when you re-boot with the disks it will make u set up a user account, your internet connection, and such! Did you hold down the c key? Here are a few other options to try, scroll down to the booting section... http://www.finseth.com/parts/mac-keys.html Also, check the disks to see what version of OSX they are? Let us know how it goes!!!


Josh

boot up

hi thanks . Unfortunately when i bought the ibook off ebay it didnt come with any boot disks. I used my friends install disks (OSX) to boot off (holding down c) previously and it said that it was unable to install but it seemed to let me 'reset password' before crashing. I think his disks are locked to his specific ibook???
When i restart it now it asks me to login when it didnt before and when i try booting up from my friends disk the 'reset password' option lists no user account available to reset.
I dont have access to a non-locked boot disk and dont really want to shell out for a brand new copy of the OS. I sthere anything else i can try?
cheers malcolm

If you are familiar with Unix/Linux you are probly familiar with the passwd file. If you can boot into single user mode shift+s then you can cd into the etc folder where the passwd file is: cd /private/etc When you get there vi passwd from here find the * after the user name with this it deletes your password to a blank password. So if you know the username you will be able to boot up type in the username and there will be no password. This may or may not work in your situation. It worked for me one time but I feel I'm fairly fluent in the command-line interface. If you do this use care. Command-line can be tricky and confusing.

Good Luck

I don't think it wil work in this case. I believe that Apple is using a shadow pass word file also. So the pass word is located in another file some place else.