Need help with Mac mini

[Logical]

I traded a Roxio game capture on Craigslist for a mid 2007 Mac Mini. It has the normal specs of that model, but it also has a partition on it for windows 7. The guy gave me the device, the power and VGA cords, and a desk that i think is a restore disk for the Lion operating system. Everything works fine except it wont let me access the admin accounts. I entered the stuff he told for the name and password but it says its wrong, so the only account i can access is the standard account. Is their a way I can reset the admin accounts or something? If I use the restore disk he gave me, will it reset all of the accounts and make it how it was when it was originally purchased a few years ago?

 

[blevins321]

The Lion installer will install the Lion 10.7 OS. I believe that the 2007s came with Leopard 10.5, so it would actually be newer than what it came with.

It's standard good practice to format the drive after buying the computer anyway, so its good that you ran into this "problem."

 

[Omnius]

The Lion installer will install the Lion 10.7 OS. I believe that the 2007s came with Leopard 10.5, so it would actually be newer than what it came with.

It's standard good practice to format the drive after buying the computer anyway, so its good that you ran into this "problem."

It's an act of lunacy not to restore a computer to system settings if you got it on craigslist. It's also why people asking for huge premiums for the machines full of pirated deluxe software suites are so absurd. Not only do they want more for the machine for software they pirated, they assume you're the special kind of idiot who won't restore the machine to factory settings.

It's all too common we come across things that are simply not right with computers purchased on ebay and craigslist. Odd and rather suspicious remote access settings being the most common.

 

[warvanov]

If you can, boot from the install disks and reformat the hard drive and install a fresh copy of OSX. Your 2007 mini can be upgraded to 10.7 Lion, but Lion requires 2 GB of RAM to install and if your mini has the original specs you may only have 1GB.

Another thing you could do is if you have another Mac, boot the mini into Target Disk Mode. It will show up as an external firewire drive. Plug it in to another Mac to reformat the drive and run the OSX installer from there, or use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your existing OSX install onto the new mini.

EDIT: If you have the original disks that came with the machine, those disks should be OSX 10.5. You can can boot from that disk, wipe the hard drive, and install a fresh copy of OSX. Your OS and software will be like new. From there you can easily upgrade it to 10.6 or 10.7.