Help with Password reset

hi there,

i recently bought a 2nd hand ibook g4 through a "swap and meet" sorta thingy from some guy at university. Its running on panther 10.3.9 and has 30GB HD space and i got a good deal on it as he was leaving for back home. My problem is that the previous owner's stuff is still in the laptop and is protected. I can't seem to delete it I do not know the admin password to log on and delete them and the disc he gave me with the iBook is for Mac osx 10.2.8. I can't seem to open the password reset utility too using the disc. Please help me out here . Thank you

I'm pretty sure you cannot change anything unless your logged in. I beleive it is possible to change the prefs if you boot into the 10.2 disc, and you install, without erasing the disc and deffinetely make sure you dont erase.
But I would reccomend just getting a new OSX CD of the latest version from off ebay. I found some for as cheap as $15 there. http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=osx+10.4

Anytime you buy a used computer it is strongly recomended that you erase the drive and install a fresh system. No telling what the previous user had on there. There are all kinds of keyloggers and phone home apps/scripts floating around out there.

hi, i tried holding down C from restart but it doesnt seem to boot from that disc. even when i inserted it and double clicked on the "install mac osx" icon, it just flashed a couple times and stopped but nothing else happened.

if i were to get any OSX 10.4 discs, be it new or from someone else 2nd hand, would i be able to overwrite this osx 10.3 i have currently installed and start afresh as system admin etc?

thank you

Yes, you would. If you can get the computer to boot from the CD/DVD that is. Are the discs you got with the iBook the ones that came with it, a full install disc bought separately, or a boot/backup disc for another Mac? You should be able to tell if they are the ones that came with the Mac as the discs will say iBook or some such on them.

If you can get the 10.2 or higher disc to boot the machine, you can reset the password and/or just reformat the drive and do a fresh install of the OS.

hi sorry i saw it wrongly. The disc given to me says "iMac Mac OS X Install" - Mac OS version 10.1.5 Cd version 1.0. Its grey in colour. I've been tryin to use this disc to restore the admin password but to no avial.

What else can i do now? If i were to buy a new OS, it has to be the full install package, does it?

The disc won't work on your machine, sorry. If you buy a full version of OSX 10.4, you should be fine, it will have the full OS version on it. Check e-bay for some decent deals.

There are lots of legal issues about theft, fraud and stealing laptops and iPods. How is it that so many people end up with no install CD or the admin password?

Sherman Homan said:

There are lots of legal issues about theft, fraud and stealing laptops and iPods. How is it that so many people end up with no install CD or the admin password?

Click to expand...

I think the biggest reason is simply the sellers are either lazy, don't know how to reformat the computer... or both. Another reason is that some people tend to think that the value of their computer is greater if they leave the expensive software applications installed on it, even though they have no intention of including the necessary installation media with it.
Some sellers also try to make it seem more 'legit' (as I suspect is the case in this example) by including at least some sort of OS disc, though the disc is the wrong machine and OS version for the computer being sold.

I understand, devilboy, what I don't understand is the buyer. How does anyone who buys a computer, Mac or PeeCee, or an iPod think they are going to work without an admin password?!

Because those are the things that buyers don't think of ahead of time when buying a used computer. :black:
They are wooed by the taunting of "tons of software" and don't think about how that "ton of software" got on there.