Password for sudo commands?

AaronH

Hi John, hope all is well!

I'm refurbishing a 2010 MacBook Pro A1286 that has been set to always boot in verbose mode. When I give a sudo command in the terminal, it asks for a password. The user account password doesn't work, nor do "admin" or "password" - which leads me to believe it is a password saved to the Bios. Is there a default password for this or a way to wipe and reset it? Or am I S.O.L. on this one?

Thanks!

John

Hey Aaron! Good to hear from you!

I'm not an expert on verbose mode, but I don't think there's anything on 2010s that can't be wiped (I think that started late 2011-ish?)

Verbose mode was often set to "on" with new boards from Apple so the tech could see the info and verify certain things. A simple PRAM reset usually restores it back to the default "off" setting. If that's not doing it, I'm wondering what happens when you power on holding down the option key...do you get the padlock?

Have you tried the typical procedure for removing a PRAM password -- change the amount of RAM and immediately reset the PRAM three times? I'm guessing that would do it....

Let me know!

John

AaronH

Figured it out...

My administrator password was blank, but sudo commands in the terminal won't work with a blank password. I changed the password temporarily and the terminal accepted that. Problem solved!

Next question - do you know of a good program to test the keyboard? I've been opening sticky note but that really only verifies the letters & numbers, plus a few shortcuts like 'command+x' but all the other alt/option/fn keys can be tiresome to verify

John

Interesting! Yeah, I've run across cases where a blank password is not a good password -- in newer OS versions, if you go into the Security settings system preference panel to do various things, it will not let you unlock the lock icon if your password is blank.

I don't have an especially interesting solution for testing keyboards unfortunately. I do it while I'm imaging the laptop, and booted up to an external drive. I keep a program called Coconut Battery on the desktop of my external boot drives, and basically I click on its name to rename it, and I type "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs", because that has every letter of the alphabet, and then I run through the number keys, down the keys on the right side, then the arrows, then enter and escape. Then I do an option-command-escape to make sure the "force quit" box comes up.

So, not especially interesting, but it gets it done, and I've gotten to the point where I can run through it in about 20 seconds.