I have inherited a Power Mac G5 from a storage closet at the school where I teach. However, the machine has an admin password on it that no one knows and there are no recovery disks for it. How would I go about resetting the password?
Well…I didn't know about it myself until an hour and a half ago. I was going to post some stuff about downloading an installer and then booting from it to reset the password when I just decided to do a Google search. That's the first link that came up.Seconded. Thanks @eyoungren - if I'd known of this trick, it would've saved me considerable grief over the years, including a recent situation with a faulty optical drive and an inability to boot via USB.
IMO it is wise to completely wipe (secure erase) the hard drive of any used system you acquire. This is to ensure you know the state of the system and that there aren't any nasty surprises hiding on the drive.
You can run OS X 10.5.8 max. There is a minimum OS you can install but it's model specific so unless we know what your model is we can't tell you that. Most people run Tiger (10.4) or Leopard (10.5).Where would I get a copy of an OS that would run on this machine?