petteri
Well-known member
I bought a new project even though I think Apple Macintosh Classic is a rather boring piece of hardware. It came with an ADB Mouse II and an Apple Keyboard II, nothing special there. The case is really yellow but on the hand the logic board is pretty clean. It had original battery and very minimal or no leakage from the capacitors.
Now the interesting part. After booting up from the hard drive the startup process halts right before loading the desktop and it asks password for the mac. In case of a mouse click it reboots. Starting up without extensions has the same behaviour.
I tried to boot it up from an external HD but as soon as I tried to mount the internal drive I got the same password prompt (but it didn't reboot if I dismissed the dialog, just didn't mount the drive). I haven't encountered such protection before but I found a thread about HD protection https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-silverlining-password-protected-drive.33004/
I believe the contents of the hard drive are not really encrypted but this is some driver level stuff. Pretty interesting anyways how the SCSI driver is able to inject the password dialog even though the current operating system doesn't have any extensions for it. I attempted couple typical passwords and searched forums but no luck.
This Classic has a programmer's switch so it was time to try that. After several attempts I managed to bypass the protection. The trick was to start without extensions and then hit the switch when the password dialog appears. Then the dialog crashes with an error 28 and the mouse pointer freezes. But the desktop loads up now! It is possible to open folders and navigate around with the keyboard shortcuts. I found a Silver Volumes application which somehow re-enabled mouse pointer after launching it and didn't trigger the password dialog like other applications. At this point I could mount an external drive and copy necessary files from "protected" drive.
I think this simple bypass is only possible if the hard drive has a booting operating system and might not work with any other hardware combination.
Now the interesting part. After booting up from the hard drive the startup process halts right before loading the desktop and it asks password for the mac. In case of a mouse click it reboots. Starting up without extensions has the same behaviour.
I tried to boot it up from an external HD but as soon as I tried to mount the internal drive I got the same password prompt (but it didn't reboot if I dismissed the dialog, just didn't mount the drive). I haven't encountered such protection before but I found a thread about HD protection https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-silverlining-password-protected-drive.33004/
I believe the contents of the hard drive are not really encrypted but this is some driver level stuff. Pretty interesting anyways how the SCSI driver is able to inject the password dialog even though the current operating system doesn't have any extensions for it. I attempted couple typical passwords and searched forums but no luck.
This Classic has a programmer's switch so it was time to try that. After several attempts I managed to bypass the protection. The trick was to start without extensions and then hit the switch when the password dialog appears. Then the dialog crashes with an error 28 and the mouse pointer freezes. But the desktop loads up now! It is possible to open folders and navigate around with the keyboard shortcuts. I found a Silver Volumes application which somehow re-enabled mouse pointer after launching it and didn't trigger the password dialog like other applications. At this point I could mount an external drive and copy necessary files from "protected" drive.
I think this simple bypass is only possible if the hard drive has a booting operating system and might not work with any other hardware combination.