06-17-2008, 08:41 PM

First off - I messed up. I now know I did. Any help to get me out of this sticky wicket is duly appreciated.

It all started when I tried to bind my MacBook (running 10.5.3) to my Windows SBS2003 domain. Everything went great, and all worked fantastically until I logged off and in with my domain name for the first time. On login it asked if I wanted to create a mobile profile, to which I said yes. When this failed I got the first sign that something was wrong.

Wanting to rectify, I logged out of my domain account and went to log back in using my local Macbook account, which I've been using for months and months without problem. Imagine my shock when I realised that this had disappeared!!

I quickly realised that this will have happened because my local account and domain account both shared the same username - 'brian'. I'm guessing that when I logged in using the domain account it replaced my local one. Nightmare.

Quickly I logged back in to my domain account and dropped out to terminal. At least my fears were partially alleviated here - looking in /Users/Brian I noticed that all my old folders were still there. Unfortunately they are listed as owner 501 and group staff, with permissions drwx----------+ so I can't access them on my domain account.

Someone please tell me how I can get back to these files, as I've all sorts of photos etc in iPhoto in my local account. How do I get these back, or at least get access to the old directories so that I can copy them out onto an external drive before performing any type of recovery on my macbook?

Any help truly, truly appreciated. I know now that using the same username was problematic - I guess I thought it would work as windows, with the two accounts being labeled brian and brian.domain, where domain is the domain name.

The small consolation is that my macbook joined the domain swimmingly and is working grand in that respect - I just need to get back to my files in the old local user account.

Please someone help!!

06-17-2008, 09:10 PM

try this in the terminal while logged into the domain account. the sudo command will ask you for a password.

sudo mkdir /Backup
sudo cp -Rv /Users/brian/ /Backup/

you should see verbose output of what it copies.

If it fails, try enabling the root account to run those commands. While logged in as root you won't need the sudo part.

06-18-2008, 08:15 AM

thanks for this! I've managed to now get all my data off the laptop, so you're a legend already. Just to put the icing on the cake, do you know of a way to reinstate my old, local user account, or am I going to have to do a reinstall?

06-18-2008, 08:09 PM

I would guess that since you have all your data back, you might want to unbind from the domain. Create a new user, log in as root and the do the same command again/

this time,...

cp -Rv /Backup/ /Users/newusername/

I think the command is correct. I think the permissions may propagate from the home directory. Give it a rip.

By just unbinding, your account may come back on line. I might try that before the copy command.