Unknown Name and Password Required after Power Surge

[mtbraun]

Hi, I am trying to help a friend out with his Mac. Its an old PowerBook G4, I am not even sure of the age but its got to be close to 6-7 years old.

Anyways he had a power outage/maybe Surge in his house and now every time he boots up his Powerbook it ask for "Name" and "Password". Its not the normal user screen and none of his names or passwords work.

Can anyone give some advice or at least point in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

 

[Eraserhead]

Try reinstalling the operating system from the CD's. If you have a Mac try using Firewire target disk mode (hold down T on startup and link the computers with a firewire cable) to get his data off first if that's possible.

 

[mtbraun]

Thanks I don't think he has the cds but I have Tiger and could install that. I was trying to save some time if there was any work-arounds but from what I read there doesn't seem to be any.

 

[JediMeister]

There's a login preference that sets the login window to appear as name and password rather than the list of names. It's in Accounts->Login Options. I can't for the life of me explain how this was caused by a power outage. If you can mount the drive through FireWire Target Disk mode, I believe you can yank the preference file that controls that, it's got the path of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist. This SHOULD reset the login options back to the original configuration and allow your friend to access the system once again, assuming his password is valid.