[kelesh]

PLEASE HELP ME!!

Uh, I *know* my user password, but i keep getting this error. I can't unlock the screen because of this. I tried my password like 5 times then it gave me a spinning beachball for a while and came back with an error message "Sorry, you have attempted to authenticate too many times. Try again later", which is also annoying.

i mistyped my password the first time but none of the other times. i even typed it into my username box to make sure that all the letters were working, and they were.

anyway, i'm locked out of my powerbook... clean install of panther. what can I do? my user, kelesh (admin) has the same password as root, if that's useful.

[kelesh]

also - how bad is it to do a hard shutdown / reboot? because that's all i can think of now. i have "show shutdown and restart buttons" disabled, and unfortunately i haven't enabled ssh yet, so I can't think of any ways to get into this machine.

[Developer]

Have you maybe caps lock on?

If you shut down your PowerBook you will lose all unsaved data. And it's bad to force shut down, but it's not too bad (no app is likely right now writing data to files for example). You should check your hard disk after that maybe.

[kelesh]

uh no caps lock is off. i typed my password in the username space to make sure it typed correctly, and it did. just to try i also tried it with caps lock ON and that also failed. there's no way to bring up some command prompt login window?

or something that doesn't use loginwindow.app? Or is there a way to safer way to force a restart or shutdown with keys other than the power button?

any ideas what went wrong here?

[kelesh]

also, how do I check the hard disk? Is there a program like scandisk or better?

[Developer]

Originally posted by kelesh:
also, how do I check the hard disk? Is there a program like scandisk or better?

Use Disk Utility when booting from the Install CD.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

[kelesh]

okay, i shutdown and restarted and was able to log in. What should I do to make sure this problem never occurs again?

Also, I have to run disk utility when booted from the cd? I can't do it while i'm logged in normally? WHat's the difference?

thanks for your help

[Developer]

Originally posted by kelesh:
okay, i shutdown and restarted and was able to log in. What should I do to make sure this problem never occurs again?

Also, I have to run disk utility when booted from the cd? I can't do it while i'm logged in normally? WHat's the difference?

It won't let you reapair the disk unless you boot from CD.

Dunno what to do to avoid the problem. Isn't it working now?

Maybe try another simple password without special characters first and then try to see if maybe one special character was the cause.

[kelesh]

my password only uses letters and is not that long (8 letters)

[kelesh]

yeah its seems to be working now. it was working every time except for that one time, but that one time that it does happen was pure SUCK.

i want to make sure this NEVER EVER happens again.

also, i possibly stumbled upon some 10.3 bug

[kcmac]

This is a bug. We have had it happen several times on our iMac. Simple upgrade. 4 users. After a period of sleep, when you try to log in to any user, it wont recognize the passwords. Have to hard restart.

Sent feedback to Apple.

[kenw]

I've had the same thing happen to me on both a 500 DP tower and a 12" Powerbook. It has happened several times on both machines, including this morning. It started after installing Panther. The only solution I've found is a hard re-start, so for now I've turned off the password option on screensaver.

[kelesh]

I don't think my powerbook was in sleep mode before the error, but I can't remember. Were your computers in sleep mode? I've since disabled the screensaver password. This is a annoying bug, but what can you do... hard restarts are unacceptable.

[kenw]

Sometimes the computers were sleeping, but not all the time. And not this morning.