How do you factory reset macbook

Question

My friend has just bought a shop display macbook laptop from Duty Free Sales at Bristol Airport for her daughter. They put password in to prevent customers playing with it. She cannot get answer from shop as to what password is and unless she flies out again security will not let her through to the shop. How can she do a factory reset please? She doesn't have a Leopard disk
Thanks
Rick

Answer 1

Rick - you should get the install discs from the seller. As ypw mentioned, you can reset the password using those.
The following instructions you should use with caution, as it requires booting the computer into single user mode.
Otherwise, with the computer off you could hold down Apple Key and S and turn the computer on.
It will boot into single user mode - command prompts. You will then have to mount the disk, the instructions are provided at the last second, but it's the command fsck -y then the command mount -uw /
Once mounted, type passwd and it will ask you to enter the new password. You could also run passwd <username> (insert the username there).
By running the first option, that will enable the root account and set the password to whatever, therefore to login you would enter the username root and the password you supplied.
Be careful not to mess with much, and once you use it try to get the leopard disc and do a reinstall of the OS when you get home.