A1466 efi password problem

[elf69]

I showed a friend my macbook other day and well he loved it but wanted something light.

So I suggested he look at macbook air.

So off he went happy as larry to find one.

Now he a bit of an idiot so I said show me before you buy it.

Well he did not!

He was in such a rush to buy a mac he bought a air, a very nice one with i7 but it kinda useless.

It has a efi password.
He bought from a guy on facebook.
He sent me photos of it and the screen with efi password prompt.
Also the receipt for the machine from the apple store where the seller bought it.

He forgot the password so stuffed it in box under bed.
He decided to sell it but my friend being the idiot he is now has a £350 paper weight.

Can it be removed?
Or has he wasted his money.

He told me seller said it had a password.
Thing is my friend assumed as I work for a repair company I can remove it.

My engineer colleagues are windows trained and know nothing of apple.

This is why I told him show me what he found before buying it.
I'm not apple wizard but I would avoid such a machine personally.

 

[keysofanxiety]

EFI passwords can only be removed by Apple, so if you still have the POP, you can take it into a store and they'll remove it for you.

Otherwise the alternative would be taking out the SSD and imaging the system on a different MBA/rMBP, then swapping them over again. It'll still work fine in the OS, but it just means you can't boot into external devices or the recovery partition due to the EFI lock.

 

[elf69]

OK thanks.

So not removable via command+R.

osx daily say SOME machines can disable this via command + R and turn off efi password.

Will tell my friend take it to stormfront as we do not have a apple store only this premium reseller.

so not a complete disaster then.

 

[Weaselboy]

osx daily say SOME machines can disable this via command + R and turn off efi password.

Nope... that will prompt you for the existing password before allowing you to set a new one or remove it. Some older Macs could have the firmware password reset by removing a memory module, but this one is too new for that. Here is an article that explains it a bit.

 

[elf69]

thank you.

thought was too easy lol.

My friend has contacted the seller and is getting a refund and return item as seller said it was an i7 8GB 512GB, it is an i5 4GB 128GB.

As cannot pass the password we was not to know but checking the serial and serial on P.O.P. it shows is lesser spec.