Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

8 points

I need someone to help me out of this hole please for the love of God!

About a month ago water was spilled onto my MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo. This caused several keys on my keyboard to stick and several other keys to not function and all. To add insult to injury the DVD optical drive now works about one out of every 100 times. To drive the final nail through my brain I have been unable to locate my install disk one.

The problems stems from this.....at some point my admin password was needing to be input which it was. However not noticing the key sticking problem right away the password was somehow reset to a random number of stuck key inputs and punctuation marks. I now no longer have Admin access to my own computer.

The situation is getting desperate. Luckily I do not have to input the password on boot up but I can not add any new programs or upgrade any existing programs as I can not modify the applications folder....not being the admin and all.

I solved the keyboard problem by way of the apple mini bluetooth keyboard and just yesterday I purchased a USB external optical drive. However I have had any luck booting to the install disk (I have since borrowed a friends)

Last night I got close to resetting the password using target mode and another mac but it was sounding like I wasn't quite getting booted into single user mode as when I imput the standard seried of fsck -y and rm /-uaw and the rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone I ended up getting a promt that said something to the effect of override -rw-------uw/0 var/db/.applesetupdone? at which point I was being prompted for a yes or no which I input "Y" for yes and then it just returned and said permission denied.

Now I am back at the attempt again this morning and have another install disk. I can get to the Utilities meny and select any of the tools....."reset password" " or "system profiler" however pretty much every single utility tool I select "Quits unexpectedly" and I am asked to reset and relaunch but I can NOT get them to work.

I refer to Console and I see some error messages saying cryptic things such as....

11/24/09 8:37:57 AM [0x0-0x28028].Reset Password[261] Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
11/24/09 8:37:57 AM [0x0-0x28028].Reset Password[261] dyld: Symbol not found: __commpagedsmos
11/24/09 8:37:57 AM [0x0-0x28028].Reset Password[261] Referenced from: /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Applications/Utilities/Reset Password.app/Contents/MacOS/Reset Password

11/24/09 8:46:57 AM [0x0-0x38038].System Profiler[320] dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: __commpagedsmos

I am really at a loss here and if there is anyone out there that can help me out I would be forever greatful.

Thank you.

MPB 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB SDRAM, Mac OS X (10.4.11), M-Audio Firewire 410 / E-MU Xboard Midi Controller

Posted on Nov 24, 2009 9:53 AM

18 replies

Rod Hagen

Level 7

32,000 points

Nov 27, 2009 4:40 PM in response to rckseattle

Hi rck,

Open Firmware and "FileVault passwords are different things. If you had an "OpenFirmware" password set on the computer you wouldn't be able to boot from a CD/DVD by holding down the "C" key at all.

So we can be confident you don't have an "open firmware" password set.

The "Master Password" is primarily used in situations where people have "lost" their FileVault password, but in your case it seems that FileVault is off anyway, so this is of little importance.

See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh1903.html and the various links at http://www.apple.com/support/tiger/accounts/ to learn a bit more about such things in Tiger (I'm not sure which OS version you are currently using, though, so you may need to adjust for such things)

Rod

rckseattle Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 2, 2009 7:54 PM in response to Martin_UK

Hey I apologize for hurting anyones feelings, but I think if you read through all the threads you might have a different take on it, thanks for the pointers about formatting my posts though. Yeah i can certainly see how many people were confused by what I was asking, it has been a long frustrating road but I just wanted to get all of the information across and as helpful as these forums are they suffer the same setbacks as most conversations do when it comes to texting. The people that were helping me the most weren't having too much trouble understanding what I was relaying and going back through the threads I can pick out several comments that were suggestions about my attitude and "tone" yet not not much advice on how to fix my computer.

Anyway, point taken and AGAIN thank you to everyone who has helped. Out of all of my posts that to you are apparently meandering and cryptic the one phrase you set your sights specifically on is a little ironic and in response to someone taking offense to my tone.....anyway I was never angry or meant to disrespect anyone here, but whatever.....I probably won't be seeing you at the family Christmas dinner this year......again. I guess you didn't see any of the thank you's or appreciative posts that I made, i just came on here and asked for help and started calling people dicks??!! LOL.

Anyway, like I said I appreciate the feedback. I'll work on my forum etiquette. I haven't had a lot of need for technical support in the past as I was always the one giving support so it added to an already frustrating situation so again I apologize for writing things in caps sometimes and even going so far as to put certain words in quotation marks. I have learned my lesson, let me tell you.

rckseattle Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 2, 2009 8:08 PM in response to Rod Hagen

Rod,

Thanks again for your help. This one got weirder and a little more bizarre by the day but I am glad to report that I fixed it!! It took about a case of Red Bull and two days of learning some terminal code and reading two complete Mac OsX manuals but it is now fixed although not without a little loss of data.

Not so much loss of data just having to re install.....everything! Your post about the firmware thing I get but after resetting the open firmware settings I was getting into an actual real bootscreen at install so apparently I wasn't getting into single user mode. I can't figure out exactly what the issue was but after managing to reset the password, I realized no matter what I did it would not give me administrator access no matter what I did. I actually had a user set up that was called System Administrator yet when it listed what "type" of user this account was it still said "Standard".

It was at that point that I figured I had to many ghosts in the machine so I managed to get administrator access by using the "Root" passwd change magic in terminal which allowed me to back everything up and I just did a complete wipe of the system and am now a happy camper back to a working studio and running Snow Leopard.

So again, thanks for leading me in all good directions I appreciate it. I hope I didn't hurt your feeling s too. Anyway I'll clear the forum of all my meanness now and get back to what I do best (not playing with others)

rck

I need someone to help me out of this hole please for the love of God!