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Luckily, it was actually on my 'Applications' disc that came with the machines - not a bad result. However upon reading up on the hardware test, it doesn't work if you have a firmware password set. Now my problem is being able to remove the firmware password from said iMac.. without the ability to boot into anything at all.

It is a 21" imac, purchased in approx July 2010, so no warranty unfortunately. What I mean by not booting is that whichever I attempt to boot from, about as far as I am able to get is the white screen with the Apple logo & the spinning gear - I have been able to boot into safe mode a few times, but this is rare and even when I am able to, the mouse moves but does not click, nor does the keyboard work. Booting into target disk mode in principal sounds like a great idea but the other 3 machines that did have the same problem before hand the disks were not repairable using disk utility, so had to rebuild. I will give it a go later on though, class in the room now & the bootcamp partition on that same machine still very strangely works, so they are at least able to use that. Where would I go about 'acquiring' a diagnostic cd for that particular machine? Is it something that we can buy? Thanks so far!

Have tried booting from a SL disc, but had effectively given that up after the thing was still trying to load it after at least half hour. Keep the suggestions coming though, might've missed something very simple, it is friday..

Unable to format the whole drive as can't get disk utility booted from either the hdd or recovery partition. It's Lion too so we don't have a disc to format from, even if we were able to boot to disc too! Can't really see what else I can try here

Hi all This morning we've had 4 imacs refuse to boot to the mac partition. At first I thought ok, maybe that partition has corrupted which happens from time-to-time, so 3 of the 4 I have rebuilding at the moment because disk utility couldn't repair each of the partitions. Get to the 4th one & can't boot to the recovery partition at all, odd. Can boot to the Windows partition fine & everything works fine. Can't then boot to the network, so currently can't rebuild this thing. Read a few things online, tried running disk utility through terminal commands remotely to no avail, and booting to safe mode worked the 9th time (Not that I was counting or anything..) but then the keyboard/mouse did not work whatsoever. This is the same keyboard mouse that works fine on the bootcamp part of said machine. Swapped them with known working ones, no joy. I then reluctantly try to network boot again & hurrah, it worked! Wait never mind, keyboard/mouse still doesn't work. Is there anyone that has had anything like this before, I seem to be just going around in circles here & getting nowhere fast!

Depends.. can I access the interwebz on this laptopamabob?

Computer Hardware - Scan.co.uk. They do a 'Today only' section too, always worth a quick look incase there's something that takes your fancy!

We do almost everything in-house, and by almost that really means everything except complete server hardware failure. It's only really me here that touches the macs and configures everything about them, and there is almost nothing that will need changing if setup properly and it will just run itself. However, we had 8 imacs stolen recently and they have been an absolute nightmare ever since. These new imacs we then got, shipped with Lion where our others were snow leopard. At the time I couldn't find a way to feasibly downgrade the new ones to snow leopard so we ended up wanting to upgrade the lot to lion - except our server. Of course then had to create new deploystudio bootsets, create a completely new image, etc etc. Eventually rolled Lion out, and of course, all our workgroup manager preferences were for snow leopard systems, so most applications weren't allowed to run. We're still running snow leopard server which isnt great at managing lion clients, but got there in the end. To put things into perspective a little, i'm not yet 20, this is my first full-time job & been here approx year and a half, no mac qualifications nor had I even used a mac before being given responsibility for this project, and I managed to pick it al up within a week or two of fiddling around with it all. Granted most of it was set up before I got the job, but it is unimaginably easy to run which gave me the time to learn how everything was set up. In short; Once set up, unimaginably easy to run and manage. But when we faced changes that were forced upon us, Apple made it very difficult for us, had we been able to just downgrade the new macs we had it would've saved me a good 2 weeks work!

Thanks for the replies all! Turns out that this doesn't look likely to go ahead, but food for thought nonetheless, it's always good to know how to do these things!

Turn the printer off, then when you turn it back on when the printhead moves to the centre just pull the power out? Other than that i'm not sure how you'd do it. And if this completely stuffs it up.. It wasn't me.

Hi all, Finally our imacs are going to be put in proper use next academic year, and said member of staff who teaches in the room everyday seems really enthusiastic about the whole thing! Anyway, he would like to be able to observe/control client machines from a different machine, a little bit like RM Tutor (only one I can think of at the moment). Apple remote desktop will of course do the job, but i'm just a little concerned about how much said member of staff will have access to. I'm pretty sure they won't start fiddling around, but i'd just like to make sure he only has access to what he actually needs access to. All he wants to do is observe, control, lock/unlock screens, message, log user out etc, just the basic things. I have noticed that you can just delete the scanner tool from the left hand pane, but you're able to re-add that by going to File > New Scanner. Is there a way of 'locking down' ARD so that said member of staff could only access those basic functions? I'm sure i've seen somewhere a pre-configured locked down version of ARD which has only the basic functions, but not been able to find it now that it may actually be useful - typical. Of course if there are any programs that will allow him to control OSX as such from his Windows machine - even better - but I highly doubt there are. Thanks in advance

Somebody failed GCSE Maths! 8/10 for effort though..

Hi Rozzer soryr for the late reply, do I need to look at the server console logs or client ones after logon?

On Lings site go on the home tab (IF YOU CAN FIND THE BL**DY THING) then scroll down all the way to the bottom.. it's worth it. Absolutely brilliant, couldn't stop laughing for ages after seeing that!

Or hold down alt on boot and then go from there!

Hi all, Have a bit of a peculiar problem here. We're currently running 10.7 clients which is managed by 10.6 server. We only upgraded our clients recently so have been getting our head around managing Lion with Snow Leopard server, and have realised that none of the iMovie, iWeb, Garageband etc apps are allowed to run. Now these are set to allow in WGM but as we're running different clients the version of those apps are different from the ones that reside on the server. Now the obvious fix here would be to just unblock all apps/programs on the clients but having installed Office 2011 there is RDP on there, and things such as terminal and network utility etc. Unless i'm missing something really obvious, how would I go about managing to allow these programs without allowing everything else at the same time?!

Ah, I can't help you out too much then unfortunately! Can't seem to find anything regarding quotas in Lion online either. That is ridiculous though, why remove something like that?!

I know in 10.6 server if you go into Server admin, then file sharing, pick a volume, and then on the quotas tab towards the bottom half of the window. Never set quotas up mind you, so not sure if this is what you're after and of course this will be fairly useless if you're using 10.7 server!

Can't even begin to thank you enough, all is now working! Was dreading the thought of rebuilding OD from scratch, thanks so much!

It seemed like I was able to run the above 3 commands without fail, as in, no errors were returned when running them and all looked successful. How will I know if this had sorted the issue?!

Here are the logs, hope they're of some help! EDIT: Having just read the logs, looks like they need to be restored from backup?!

I'm able to run the last command, which successfully loads org.openldap.slapd it seems, but then running the second command after that gives me: db_recover: checkpoint LSN record [785] [6635693] not found db_recover: PANIC: DB_NOTFOUND: No matching key/data pair found db_recover: DB_ENV->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery Looks as if it wants me to run a recovery, but not sure what/where to find it!

I get an error from terminal after trying to run the first one; 'launchctl: Error unloading: org.openldap.slapd'. Sam

Hi JR-PCS, thanks for the reply. Are there any guides out there on doing this? I'm not really all that worried about making it worse, as it currently can't get that much worse as nothing is working at the moment!

Hi all, Bit of a head scratcher here. A few days before half term we had to shut down all servers due to air con failing. For reasons i'm unaware of our mac server was not shutdown before the power switch was hit. The next morning our macs would not let anybody log in, not even admins, so after a few restarts of the server this seemed to rectify itself. All was working right up until easter, so back I came after a 2 week holiday to find that nobody can log into our macs yet again, only this time admin users are able to log in, but not students/teaching staff etc. The strange thing is our ODadmin account seems to have just been wiped off the face of the earth, the home directory for it still exists, but it doesn't now show up in Sys Prefs > Users. Can't log in to it either, which means I also cannot log into WGM and authenticate to LDAP.. So I can't do much at the moment! I have attached the error WGM throws at me when trying to authenticate with the correct credentials to LDAP: This is also thrown at me when trying to go into Server Prefs: Any ideas?! EDIT: We're using 10.7.3 clients and 10.6.8 server.