Desperately Need Help....any guru's? I got a good one for you.

[rckseattle]

I must say when things go wrong for me......they go......WROOOONGGGG!! I really need your help....someone out there please......

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 am so desperate.... please is there anyone out there that can help me??? I would be forever greatful. My MacBook Pro is my baby and I am a songwriter and I have so many songs I need to work on and I have many programs that need updating.

Please help.

[wrldwzrd89]

Can you get Target Mode set up again, with the other Mac? If you can, then try the applesetupdone trick from the other Mac. If that works, try booting the troublesome Mac normally. It should let you choose a new password.

[Consultant]

You do NOT need single user mode to change password.

Use / borrow an external keyboard?

[madog]

Is the friends disk a retail disk or system disk that came with his computer?

If it's the latter, I would say go out and buy a Snow Leopard disk for $30. That would be the cheapest method. However, while Tiger and Leopard could more or less reset the admin passwords of the other system, I don't know if SL can do the same if you have Leopard. I would say there is a 98% chance that it will work, but I'm just not positive.

[iLog.Genius]

Originally Posted by madog

Is the friends disk a retail disk or system disk that came with his computer?

If it's the latter, I would say go out and buy a Snow Leopard disk for $30. That would be the cheapest method. However, while Tiger and Leopard could more or less reset the admin passwords of the other system, I don't know if SL can do the same if you have Leopard. I would say there is a 98% chance that it will work, but I'm just not positive.

I'm with Madog. I can't say for sure because I had a customer call in with a disc that wasn't included with his computer and when trying to reset the password through the disc, the Username or OS wasn't listed in the drop down menu. Can't say if it's because the disk wasn't valid or if the computer had other issues.