Why Is There No Access How To Do It

Why Is There No Access How To Do It

Its quite easy to do on a Mac, and learning how to do it can help you keep yourself better protected, too.

Heres how it works.

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Welcome to Lifehackers Fifth Annual Evil Week Its that time of year again: With Halloween getting closer, were feeling the need to unleash our Read more Advertisement Most methods of breaking into a Mac are variations on the same thing, so were going to highlight the two easiest waysone with a Mac OS X installer and one withoutand show you how to avoid having them used on you.

Note that while these two methods will get you into the OS without knowing the password, you can always just use our previously mentioned lazy method with a Mac toojust boot up the computer with a Linux Live CD and start grabbing files.

How to Break Into a Windows PC (and Prevent It from Happening to You).

While there are cracking utilities like John the Ripper or THC-Hydra, theyre either complicated to use or expensive to buy, so we wont go into them here like we did with Windows (which has the very easy-to-use Ophcrack ).

Method One: Reset the Password with the OS X Installer Advertisement If you have the Mac OS X installer CD handy, its super easy to change the administrator accounts password.

Just insert the CD into the target Mac and hold the c key as you boot up the computer.

If the computer in question doesnt have a CD drive, you can either hold Option at boot and choose the Recovery partition at startup, or put the Mavericks or Yosemite installer on a flash drive.

Youll get a window prompting you to select the drive on which OS X is installed; so choose the drive you want to get into and select the user whose password you want from the drop-down menu.

Note: If youre using the Mountain Lion installer or later, you wont see this menu item.

Instead, choose Terminal from the menu, type in resetpassword, and press Enter to get to the password reset menu.

How to Create an OS X Mavericks USB Installation Drive OS X Mavericks is available in the Mac App Store now, but its only an upgradebut if you want to Read more Advertisement Enter a new password for that user and hit the save button.

Thats it When you reboot the computer, you can use your new password to log into the computer.

Note that unfortunately, you still wont be able to unlock the Keychain, so if what youre trying to access has another layer of password protection, you need to do some extra legwork to view it.

Method Two: Reset the Password in Single User Mode Advertisement If you dont have an installer CD handy, you just need to do a bit of fancy command-line footwork to achieve the same end as the CD method.

The Mac will boot into single user mode, giving you a command prompt after loading everything up.

If the Mac is running Snow Leopard or below, type the following commands, hitting Enter after each one and waiting for the prompt to come up again before running the next one: sbinfsck -fy sbinmount -uw launchctl load SystemLibraryLaunchDaemonscom.apple.DirectoryServices.plist dscl.

Userswhitsongordon lifehacker Advertisement If the Mac is running Lion or above, youll instead want to use the following commands: sbinfsck -fy sbinmount -uw launchctl load SystemLibraryLaunchDaemonscom.apple.opendirectoryd.plist dscl.

Userswhitsongordon lifehacker Advertisement Replace whitsongordon with the user whose account you want to access and lifehacker with the new password you want to assign to that user.

If you get an error message about com.apple.DirectoryServicesLocal.plist on a Lion or Mountain Lion machine, just ignore itthe password reset should still work.

If you dont know the users username, it should be pretty easy to run ls Users at any time during single user mode to list all the home folders on the Mac, which usually correspond to the usernames available on the Mac.

Note that the users password is different than the root password.

Why Is There No Access For Mac