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crashxb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2010
26
0
West Coast, USA
I have a lamp style iMac and when I boot it up I get the flashing folder from the mac face to the question mark. I booted it up with the OS X DVD, but a padlock comes up. I have never set a password for this computer, except to login, and that password isn't working. Is there a way around this? I've tried everything I can think of.
 
I have a lamp style iMac and when I boot it up I get the flashing folder from the mac face to the question mark. I booted it up with the OS X DVD, but a padlock comes up. I have never set a password for this computer, except to login, and that password isn't working. Is there a way around this? I've tried everything I can think of.

Remove the stick of ram in the panel on the bottom of your iMac. As for the question mark, that is either corrupt system files or a dead hard drive.
 
Remove the stick of ram in the panel on the bottom of your iMac. As for the question mark, that is either corrupt system files or a dead hard drive.

Alright, well removing the ram did absolutely nothing that I can see. I'm still looking at the padlock. What exactly does the padlock mean? I just need to be able to boot up the computer with the OS X DVD so I can repair the HD.
 
You're still getting the padlock? Changing the amount of ram in your computer is supposed to get rid of that. The padlock I believe is a firmare password.
 
Can you take a picture of the padlock? I've never seen such a thing before.

But i've never heard of removing RAM to disable a password before.
 
bootDevice-Padlock.jpg


I removed the ram and restarted the computer and still got this screen. I put the ram back, same thing.
 
Ok after doing some research, this is what I found online:

Force Removing Password Protection

1) Add or remove DIMMs to change the total amount of RAM in the computer.

2) Then, the PRAM must be reset 3 times. (Command + Option + P + R).

Please note that I cannot vouch that this does or does not work. But its all I was able to find.
 
Apparently what you did before to remove the bottom stick of ram was correct. But the previous poster forgot to mention the second step.
 
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