MacBook – “Find My iPhone” locked the Mac

find-my-macicloudmacbook pro

Yesterday my MacBook Pro started to be blocked.

When it boots it asks for the password for the Guest account. No password is right. According to various sources of information I found on the Web, this may mean that the computer has been locked from iCloud using "Find My iPhone".

From https://www.icloud.com/#find the Macbook seems to be blocked:

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But there is no "unlock" button on iCloud:

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When I click "Play Sound" a sound is effectively played by the Macbook:

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"Find My iPhone" is not able to locate the computer's location, but it is here, on my desk!

When I power off the MacBook Pro something changes on https://www.icloud.com/#find and a button "Remove from Account" appears. After I clicked that button the MacBook Pro is removed from the device listing. But as soon as I reboot the Macbook will reappear in the listing.

I don't understand what is wrong: I own the computer, I own the iCloud/Apple ID account but I can neither use it, nor unlock it.

I tried to call Apple, today they won't respond (today it's Sunday, tomorrow is a holiday in my country.) I can't wait till tuesday.

Do you know how to solve my issue?

Best Answer

Solved following these steps.

Removed my macbook from iCloud
Followed this guide: http://www.tomsguide.com/forum/id-1317787/unlock-apple-macbook-pro.html

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Mac – way to enable “Find the Mac” to locate your computer but not remotely wipe the drive

In this Knowledge Base article, Apple write "With Find My iPhone set up on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch or Mac, you can locate, display a message, play a sound, remotely lock, or remotely wipe (erase) your device using the Find My iPhone app from another device (such as a friend's iPhone or iPad)."

This is the closest I have found to a direct statement that it's one package: if it's set up, you can locate, display a message, play a sound, lock, or erase. None of the documentation about configuration mentions options to enable these selectively; the control is off/on.

As far as disabling remote wipe, there seems to be a strong indication that the remote wipe involves rebooting to the Restore partition. Evidences for this include the fact that "Find my Mac" will not turn on (be greyed out) if there is no Restore partition present. Also, it would be very difficult for a running process to wipe its own boot drive. The Find my Mac remote wipe causes a reboot. It seems most likely that wherever the remote wipe lives, it's somewhere on the recovery partition.

So, Find my Mac won't turn on unless there is a recovery partition. Remote wipe most likely won't work if the Recovery partition isn't bootable. To enable Find My Mac but disable Remote Wipe, you need to have a recovery partition, and it needs to not successfully boot. Sabotage the recovery system somewhere so it can't boot and thus can't be used as the plaatform to wipe your main drive. Of course you will want to keep an external bootable recovery drive (USB stick?) available if you do this.

IPhone – Why does a MacBook Pro keep dialing in its location through Find My Mac after a clean install

Here's what Apple says:

Because of how Find My Mac works, you must deselect the box next to Find My Mac in the OS X System Preferences > iCloud pane to remove your device from your iCloud Find My iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Mac device list.

One of the ways this persistence is implemented is by writing a Find My Mac token to NVRAM, the persistent memory in Intel Macs. You can see this token by running the following command in a terminal:

nvram -p | grep fmm

On my Mac, the result includes my name, Apple ID, and the name I gave the computer, along with some encoded information that probably includes a key of some sort.

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