Bought an iBook at auction, no password/login

Hello,

Try

1. Power on or restart your Mac (should work for any Mac OS X system).
2. At the chime (or grey screen if your chime is turned off), hold down Command+S on your keyboard to enter single-user mode.
3. This step is optional, but it’s a good idea because it checks the consistency of the hard disk before moving on. At the prompt, type fsck -fy and press Enter/Return. Wait for the checks to complete before going to the next step.
4. Type mount -uw / and press Enter.
5. Type rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone and press Enter.
6. Type shutdown -h now and press Enter.

The third method of resetting your Mac’s password requires some additional explanation. Rather than simply changing the password like the previous two methods do, this one fools the operating system into believing it has never been started before. This means when you restart the machine, it will take you through the entire setup & registration process all over again. Do not worry, all of your pre-existing data is still available. Just continue with this process and do not choose the option to transfer or migrate information to the Mac.

Once you’re done, log in with your new admin account and go to System Preferences > Accounts. You may have to click on the lock icon in the lower-left corner before making changes here. You should see your original user account(s) in the left column. Try clicking on one of them to convert it to a standard user account (uncheck “Allow user to administer this computer”) and change the password. You should be able to successfully log in to that account now and access all of your files and programs. If you want, you can log back in with your new admin account and re-check the “Allow user to administer this computer” option in System Preferences to grant admin privileges to the original user again.

Hi, and welcome to Apple Support Communities.

Press the Command + s key during startup as the startup chime is ending. This takes you to Single User Mode, where you will see a command line.

Type this when the command-line prompt (>) appears:

/sbn/mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

reboot

When the iBook restarts, you will see the setup screen. This allows you to create a new account, being sure to give yourself administrative privileges. You can now use this new account and set it to log in automatically with this new account if you don't want to be bothered with the login screen every time you start up.

You can also delete any previous users from the Users folder if you don't want the information that's in that account.

Good luck!

I've discovered that many times, schools set up the login as "admin" for the administrative login i.d. and "password" as the password.

It's worth a shot. And if it doesn't work that way, trying turning them around with "password" for the login i.d. and "admin" for the password.

One never knows…

Rhonda, I am having a similar problem with my computer that I got at a auction for a high school, only when I do this, after set up it just sends me back to the school'd log in page.