Pavel Jelic When you think of protecting your Mac, many of you think of protection in the form of a password-protected user account. Password protection is fine and in many cases sufficient, but if you want to give your Mac a higher level of security and protect yourself from data theft, you must use FileVault or a firmware password. And it is the second mentioned option that we will focus on in this article. A firmware password is password protection, and it's the best possible way to protect the data inside your Mac. How does it work, how to turn it on and how does it manifest itself?
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If you decide to activate FileVault, the data on the hard drive will be encrypted. This may seem like great protection, which it really is, but anyone can still connect, for example, an external hard drive with macOS installed to your device. Using this procedure, he can then work with the disk further, for example format it or perform a clean installation of macOS. If you would like to prevent this too, you can. Just set the firmware password.
How to activate firmware password
First, move your Mac or MacBook to recovery mode (recovery). To get into recovery, first your Mac turn off completely, then it again using the button turn on and immediately after press and hold the keyboard shortcut Command + R. Hold the keys until it appears on the screen recovery mode. After loading the recovery mode, press the tab in the top bar Utility and select an option from the menu Secure Boot Utility.
Once you click on this option, a new window will appear in the form guide to activate the firmware password. Click the button Enable Firmware Password… and enter password, with which you want to protect your firmware. Then enter the password once again for checking. Once you've done that, click the button Set password. After that, the last notification will appear, alerting you to firmware password activation. Now just restart your Mac - click in the upper left corner of the screen Apple logo and select an option from the drop-down menu that appears Restart.
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How to disable firmware password?
If you reach the stage where you no longer want to use the firmware password, you can simply deactivate it. You just need to use exactly the same procedure as mentioned above, only in the case of deactivation, of course, you have to remember original password. If you decide to deactivate, you must enter the original password in the appropriate fields in the wizard for disabling the firmware password. The firmware password can also be changed in a similar way. But what if you don't remember the original password?
Forgot firmware password
If you forget your firmware password, you're simply out of luck. They can unlock the firmware password only Apple Store employees in the Genius Bar. As you probably know, there is no Apple Store in the Czech Republic - you can use the nearest store in Vienna. Don't forget to take with you the receipt or an invoice from the store where you purchased your device. Although there are several discussions circulating on the Internet, which say that it is enough to call the Apple phone support. Unfortunately, I have no experience with this and cannot say 100% whether user support would be able to remotely unlock your Mac or MacBook.
Last rescue
When I recently activated the firmware password for testing, with the intention of disabling it after a few days of use, I naturally forgot it. After trying to install Windows on my MacBook using Boot Camp, the installation failed and my MacBook crashed due to creating a new partition locked. I told myself that nothing was wrong, that I knew the password. So I repeatedly entered the password in the field for about half an hour, but still unsuccessfully. When I was completely desperate, one thing came to my mind - what if the keyboard is in locked mode v another language? So I immediately tried entering the firmware password as if I was typing s on the keyboard American keyboard layout. And wow, the MacBook is unlocked.
Let's explain this situation to example. You have enabled the firmware password on your Mac and entered the password Books12345. So you have to enter in the box to unlock the firmware Kniykz+èščr. This should recognize the password and unlock your Mac.
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If you decide to activate the firmware password, please note that if you forget the password, no one (except Apple Store employees) will be able to help you. You should activate the security feature on your Mac if you are really afraid that someone could misuse your data, or if you have drawings for a functional perpetual motion machine stored on your hard drive. In short and simply, if you don't belong to a higher social class and don't own data that someone else might be interested in, then you probably won't need to activate the firmware password.
It should be noted that if you have secured (disabled by default) booting from external drives, e.g. MacBook Pro 2018, no one without knowing the user's password can connect any other drive to the MacBook, boot another system, or work with a FileVault-protected drive, as you write...
Thank you for the guide to unlocking the firmware. I struggled for a long time