How do I disable "ON GUARD"?

[hondo11008]

this is a copy and paste of the tail-end of a whole other problem. To recap: LC-575 (circa 1994), bought from school surplus, OS 7.5/7.6.1, CD & floppy. I'm desperately trying to do a clean install of OS 7.6.1. Pardon my lazyiness:

I still can't do a clean OS install, but I'm pretty sure that my problem is "on guard" (its icon looks like two little fencing foils when the extensions parade during startup, right?). This would explain why I can't disable extensions with shift, and why I can't access the HD, even from a boot disk. I've already been eagerly searching a few "hackintosh" sites, looking for a way around this extension (including opt-command-s, using "find file" to find the "on guard" preference folder) but nothing works so far--I still can't disable extensions and the folders are made invisible to me in "find file." One of the more promising things I've come across is "no guard," an emergency password generator made from the cracked algorithm. Another (much scarier looking) solution is to use resedit, which I don't think I even have, to get down into the nitty gritty. Plan of action? Anyone?

 

[MoparShaha]

Use ResEdit. I used to disabled tons of OnGaurd enabled Macs back in high school with it. Assuming you can browse all directories in resedit, open the OnGaurd extensions and control panels individually. Get File Info, and deselect the "Locked" option. I think it'll give you an error, but keep tinerking with it. Then, with all the resources in front of you, do a Select All, and press Delete. Then save. Hopefully, if you were able to work around the Locked thing, it will save, and then just restart. The computer will now be unlocked. Good luck.

 

[hondo11008]

I'm afraid that on guard won't let me install it though. I'm downloading ResEdit 2.1.3 as we speak to burn onto a CD, because I can't find any evidence that it's already on the LC. Will installation be a problem? Is there anywhere I should be looking for ResEdit in particular?
thanks for your help.

 

[MoparShaha]

You should be able to run ResEdit from the disk. No need to put it on the computer. Now, sometimes administrators setup OnGaurd so no applications that aren't directly installed on the machine will run. Then you'll be out of luck, because you can't run ResEdit from your disk, and you won't be able to put it on the hard drive. At that point, you're out of options. Hopefully though, you won't have this problem.

 

[mangoduck]

i acquired an old mac or two with this and disabled it with brute force by swapping its hd into my trusty 7100 in place of the cd drive. started it normally, removed the offending extensions, and swapped back. everything was in plain sight though, so i didn't need to muck around with invisible or locked files. this method of course requires another scsi era mac.

used to be, with earlier versions of on guard, that you could boot from a cd and physically disable extensions that way. there were also ways to see into and possibly alter files inside protected directories, such as using find to show something in the finder that you know is within one of them. they eventually got wise on both counts.

 

[applemacdude]

try logging in as

user: admin
password:admin