Need help to gain access to a emac at school

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My tech school is letting me work on macs, and the only emac is password protected. So how can we gain access to it so that we can see what it is running and upgrade it. It is Running MacOSX version is unknowen. We DONT have the installition DVD.

Also if anyone knows where we can get parts for old macs that would also be very helpful.

It's passworded, you can't get in.

yea we just got in to it.

so uh... problem solved? since it was running OSX I was going to suggest booting into single user mode terminal and resetting the password

Unless FireVault is enabled or the Mac has a firmware level password required on boot, it should be pretty trivial to hack your way in with physical access to the machine. As it was, since you've already managed to do it

Mind telling me exactly what method you used?

Command line

Awesome, reminds me of when someone else set my iBook up for me and locked me out of the root user, I managed to reset the password in the Terminal at like 10 years old, and I didn't just Google it and read a tutorial either, I literally sat there and worked it all out for myself

Ugh. Mac OS X looks more and more insecure, being able to reset the root password.

Last edited by Jookia on 16 Oct 2010, 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not really, I was logged in as an admin, so I just sudo'd passwd. It'd be impossible to do that without an admin password.

Ah, that trick. I didn't think of it. Well, you're a smart one.

I thank you! I was really proud of myself at the time!

The person who set it up for me said I should never log into the root user, so naturally I needed to gain access somehow

and all this time I thought Emacs was a linux text program...

Unless you have an encrypted BIOS, any computer (regardless of operating system) is quite trivial to break into if you have physical access to the machine. OS X, Windows, and Linux can all have passwords reset from a CD. The real security problem is usually the question of whether there are remote exploits that can compromise your system from over the network.