breaking into a Mac?

[cellio]

Dear brain trust,

My father had a laptop, an old MacBook. My mother would like to know what's on it. It's password-protected. I've been unable to guess the password, even knowing some of his other passwords and some patterns he used.

I have the passwords to his two desktop computers (iMacs), but also can't get in via network share (access denied). I have his cell phone, which should let me get into his iCloud account (that's the second factor). I have the impression that none of that will help.

Is there any way I can override the laptop's password and get in anyway? Or connect an external drive and make a copy somehow? I'm willing to take the laptop and a copy of the death certificate to an Apple store, except that I don't know if it's technically possible to get in (without damaging the contents, which is the whole point of the operation). I mean, we'd all like security to actually be secure, so this shouldn't be easy, but is there something between "easy" and "impossible" that I can try?

The laptop is at my mom's house, so I can't test things immediately, but I'm looking for any clues that could help on my next visit.

Comments

[siderea]

My information is potentially very out of date, so take this with a grain of salt:

Macs have two different levels of security available to them, which amount to whether or not disc encryption (FileVault) is turned on.

If it is turned on, I have no idea how to cope with that and you may be out of luck.

But if it isn't, there's two options I know about.

This may still work:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBRwv9pvtc If you have two Macs, you can mount one on the other as an external hard drive by booting it up while holding down the T key. And, of course, wiring them together. This at least used to make an end run around boot up authentication.

The other is to literally pull the drive out of the machine, if necessary pop it into some sort of external hard drive enclosure, and then mount that on another Mac.

I have no idea what Macs are using for internal hard drives these days, so you may need a little additional hardware. My household has a variety of "Mount internal hard drives as external hard drives" equipment we have sourced from various places like Amazon and the trash.

[cellio]

Thank you. I suspect he didn't have FileVault turned on -- at least I saw no signs of it on the iMac, and since he didn't take the laptop out and about, he probably didn't have more security on it than on his main machine. (It'd be different if he thought there was a theft risk.) There are three Macs in his house (that laptop, his iMac, and an older iMac that is still on his desk), so connecting the laptop to another Mac seems easy. I'll take a network cable with me on my next visit.

fauxklore's link suggests I might be able to use his iCloud credentials to reset the password, so that's the first thing to try. Deploying a second Mac is plan B. Thanks again!

Edit: oh, a Thuderbolt cable, not Ethernet. Hmm, that's trickier, but he also has a lot of hardware and cables and stuff on his desk...