How Apple genius bar got around admin?

[Schtibbie]

Brought my 2007 white macbook in with a cracked top and failed trackpad. Turns out our battery #2 (first failed at 1.5yrs) had warped after a few months use and messed up the trackpad. They replaced it. Also they agreed to replace for free the whole top plastic and keyboard and trackpad. (Yes, i'm hoping quality control gets a LOT better from here out...) All works except gap between screen and keyb when closed is now pretty big. Odd.

Since it was my wife who dropped it off, she didn't have admin passwd. Our main user is nonadmin. Genius guy asked her for it and then said nevermind they can "get around it". Somehow he enabled a guest account. How?

 

[Bill Gates]

Does the administrator account still have the same password? One way to get around it is to boot off the Mac OS X disc and use "Reset Password" utility to gain access to the administrator account.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1274

 

[Schtibbie]

Does the administrator account still have the same password? One way to get around it is to boot off the Mac OS X disc and use "Reset Password" utility to gain access to the administrator account.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1274

They left my passwords (non-admin acct and admin acct) alone and never knew either. My wife doesn't even know the admin passwd and apple still managed to turn on a guest account.

...and now my "software update" is barfing all over itself. Can't get itunes update, QT update, and some others. Now it's just crawling w/ the progress bar... anyway that's separate issue. Sorry for thread creep.

 

[J the Ninja]

Unless you had a firmware password set, they (and anyone else) can pretty easily boot a Mac in Single User Mode and enable the root account, change the passwords, etc. You just hold down Cmd+S on startup.

 

[angelwatt]

Are you sure they even needed to login? Sounds like it was just hardware repairs so they may not have needed to. Even so, accounts are easy to get into as Apple has posted ways to recover passwords and have alternative login methods (single-user mode). That's why I use FileVault.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

A login password provides near zero security.