the 6290 came in from eBay with the load of 68k goodies inside it for me and i started to set the roadapple up for the lil' bro and ran smack into a freakin' brick wall of school district password protection.

i was ready to kill something!!!

i finally reformatted the freakin' thing but i had to:

1) unplug the power to the %#%%#%#%$# hard disk drive
2) boot from an OS install CD
3) hot plug the power connector back onto the HDD
4) it didn't mount, so i had to:
5) change the startup disk to said CD using the control panel
6) do a hot restart to make sure it'd boot from the CD
7) use HDSetup to reinitialize the GDMFPPFHDD!
8) and then install the new OS

what a freakin' pain in the patoot!

the above could probably be streamlined a little, but, has anybody come up with a more elegant solution?

the Centris (actually a Quadra) 610 didn't want to reformat with HDT when i booted from my utility infielder (troubleshooting 7.5.x install for any macintosh) external drive, it kept insisting there were too many errors, i got it to go, but i don't trust that method and the 6290 wouldn't have booted from it anyway.

lemme tell ya! i was almost ready to take the drive out and reformat the little POS with my framing hammer! arrgh!!! <bugeyes>

*breathes deeply . . . calms down just a little bit!*

anybody got any suggestions for next time around?

jt ™. .

Just an idea for dealing with password protected systems. Could you change the SCSI ID on the offending HD and add a second HD with a bootable system? (if its IDE, I'm clueless) That way the PRAM-based Startup disk info would not find the disk with the odious password protected system. From there, the offending disk would either mount regularly or you could force-mount it with disk tools. Either that or try adding the offending HD to another computer and working with it there.

Hope that helps or at least encites someone to rant at me for not knowing a thing about the problem

g4from128k

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-- The Liberated: PB 190cs, Outbound 2030E, Performa 450
-- The Originals: 128k, Mac II
-- The Contraband: 7585e & 8575G3 FrankenMacs, Pismo PB, G4/450 AGP Tower mit Cinema Display

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Just an idea for dealing with password protected systems. Could you change the SCSI ID on the offending HD and add a second HD with a bootable system? (if its IDE, I'm clueless) That way the PRAM-based Startup disk info would not find the disk with the odious password protected system. From there, the offending disk would either mount regularly or you could force-mount it with disk tools. Either that or try adding the offending HD to another computer and working with it there.

Hope that helps or at least encites someone to rant at me for not knowing a thing about the problem

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nah! nobody does that kind of thing here! (so far )

actually i didn't think to try zapping the PRAM, but when a system won't boot with extensions off or using any other keyboard modifier i really don't have any idea what's going on. if they've patched the OS to disable stuff at that level they must have had it override the PRAM settings and read them from disk during the boot sequence too. i woulda made sure to do something like that anyway.

the 6290 is an IDE box so that wouldn't have worked, it took apple FORFREAKINEVER to figure out that slave disks were a good thing and should be supported (morons!) so that'd be a no go anyway.

i think the power connector trick is a WHOLE lot easier than removing the drive and/or attaching a selector switch or confguring ID jumpers. still seems like there's gotta be a better way tho!

jt ™. .

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Hope that helps or at least encites someone to rant at me for not knowing a thing about the problem

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nah! nobody does that kind of thing here! (so far )

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* phew * Glad to hear it. Right after I posted that lame suggestion, I saw your recent posting in Resedit Help. Your statement about not sufferng fools lightly definite put the "fear of Mod" in me. Thanx for suffering this fool, at least.

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i think the power connector trick is a WHOLE lot easier than removing the drive and/or attaching a selector switch or confguring ID jumpers. still seems like there's gotta be a better way tho!

jt ?. .

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I guess I have no fear/compunction about yanking an HD and twiddling its jumpers. On the other hand, running a machine with the covers off and hot pluggin components gives me the willies. * sweating just thinking about it * (different hammer strokes for different folks, I guess)

It seems to me that the problem of dealing with password protected systems has 2 facets. First, you need to boot off a clean nonpassword protected system. Zapping the PRAM should cause the Mac to revert to some default boot sequence (i.e., look for the first disk with a valid system folder on it). Unfortunately, the default boot sequence probably puts the factory-installed password-protected HD first in line (hence the need to diddle jumpers or hotplug after boot).

Second, you need to undo whatever nasty FUBAR was applied to the HD. This second problem seems the most thorny. Your comment about getting too many errors while trying to fix the protected disk suggests that the password software is a layer inserted inserted between the high-level file system and the low-level physical disk access routines. Thus the format and data storage structures (e.g., Catalogs, Extents Maps, and B-Trees, oh my) may be in some nonstandard format. If so, reformating may be the only solution.

g4from128k

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-- The Liberated: PB 190cs, Outbound 2030E, Performa 450
-- The Originals: 128k, Mac II
-- The Contraband: 7585e & 8575G3 FrankenMacs, Pismo PB, G4/450 AGP Tower mit Cinema Display

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Hope that helps or at least encites someone to rant at me for not knowing a thing about the problem

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nah! nobody does that kind of thing here! (so far )

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* phew * Glad to hear it. Right after I posted that lame suggestion, I saw your recent posting in Resedit Help. Your statement about not sufferng fools lightly definite put the "fear of Mod" in me. Thanx for suffering this fool, at least.

quote:

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i think the power connector trick is a WHOLE lot easier than removing the drive and/or attaching a selector switch or confguring ID jumpers. still seems like there's gotta be a better way tho!

jt ?. .

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I guess I have no fear/compunction about yanking an HD and twiddling its jumpers. On the other hand, running a machine with the covers off and hot pluggin components gives me the willies. * sweating just thinking about it * (different hammer strokes for different folks, I guess)

Unfortunately, the default boot sequence probably puts the factory-installed password-protected HD first in line (hence the need to diddle jumpers or hotplug after boot).

Second, you need to undo whatever nasty FUBAR was applied to the HD . . . . reformating may be the only solution.

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mod . . . what mod????? who . . . me!?! HAR!™ you know, i don't ever think of myself as a moderator 'r nuthin' like that, ain' nobody here but jus' us chickens!

anyways . . . i don't have any problem with jumpers either, but that's one ugly@$$ way for most folks to have to do it. prolly don' even need to do a hot restart once you can set the PRAM to boot off the OS install CD. that'd be one dumb@$$ "feature" to have to support on your own hardware if you couldn't do a clean install to recover a FUBAR HDD's OS installation with your own company's installer CD! you could probably button it up after the unplug, boot, set the boot drive to the CD, reverse the process and be installing faster the way i did it even if open cases make your knees weak!

i kind of figured there was some kind of simple encryption on the drive that was making HDT spit the bitter little POS back out. that's why i looked for a more reliable way to do it with apple's tools. i still think there's gotta be a better way tho!

jt ™. .

I know this doesn't help, but i posted it anyway...

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Pizzabox LCs RULE!!!!!!!

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I know this doesn't help, but i posted it anyway...

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you never know what's gonna help, from the sound of the other posts, somebody might not even try the simple fixes when they do have a chance of working! good work!

jt ™. .

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I don't know how much help this will be, but of the three At Ease systems I have gotten, all three were cracked with the password: "admin" (no quotes).

------------------
MacMoose
Benevolent Genius, 68k MLA
Total 68K Macs liberated: 9 and counting
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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 6

Anyhoo, I have a few ZIP disks with various systems and utilities. Simply plug it in, press Command+Option+Shift+Delete to force the mac to boot from the ZIP and away I go. (key combination forces Mac to search for a bootable disk in descending order, instead of ascending, and given that the ZIP is either ID 5 or 6....) I usually don't try too hard to unlock the disk coz usually there's nothing much on it - but sometimes you pick up a cool game or something. Anyhow, I love ZIP drives (never had the click of death!) and I have been using the same 12 disks that i purchased 4-5 years ago with nary a problem.

cheers
Flash!

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What about the old faithful bootup from a floppy?

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It's pretty common stuff for schools to use, and has all the symptoms you describe.

the trick is this: put the drive in another system, and remove the extensions.

OR, if you are slick and know your startup key combos... put a SCSI hard drive on the external bus, and force startup off that useing the Command-Option-Shift-Delete-SCSI ID Number trick.

Foolproof doesn;t disable that, but will disable the "c" CD-rom startup, and generally wont allow anythig on an internal SCSI bus.

There used to be a workaround I figured out using resEdit, but it didn;t work all the time, bcause they could sometimes disable apps from being boooted off floppies and most likely wouldn't let you write to the hard drive.

these I impart onto you, for I used to work in a school district and learned all the tricks ;-)

~Marchie

~Chaplain Marchie

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these I impart onto you, for I used to work in a school district and learned all the tricks ;-)

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jt ™.
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