Help! I messed up my MBPro

I've been using macs for a long time and made a huge mistake. I changed the permissions on the Hard Drive and all contents to myself, on my macbook pro 10.5 and now it won't boot.
This laptop came with no disk, the only disk I have are 10.4 and it won't boot from that. What do I do?
Thanks

so when you press the on button, if you press option while it boots, what happens? I see no reason why it wouldn't boot to the tiger disk if your permissions are whats messed up.

(do all this with the cd in)

You hosed your system, buddy. HUGE no-no. You'll have to boot from an installation DVD and run Disk Utility there, run Repair Permissions to your system drive. That's the only solution (if it works), aside from reinstalling the OS all over again, which is a PITA time wise.

Many system files have to have "root" permissions and ownerships to run properly, and not just on the system drive, there are hidden system files on all drives. "You" do not own all the files on your system, the system has to "own" it's own files, lock you out of some, lock specific process out, allow specific processes access, etc. It's how UNIX works.

NEVER change permissions on whole hard drives to yourself, there's absolutely no reason for it. Leave permissions on things alone, unless it is a file you yourself created, and you have specific security reasons to do so, and know what you're doing first.

scottd1z3 said:

I've been using macs for a long time and made a huge mistake. I changed the permissions on the Hard Drive and all contents to myself, on my macbook pro 10.5 and now it won't boot.
This laptop came with no disk, the only disk I have are 10.4 and it won't boot from that. What do I do?Thanks

Click to expand...

If the Tiger disk is from a different machine it won't be able to boot your current one. What you can do is purchase a copy of Snow Leopard for $29 and boot with the SL DVD. Then run Disk Utilities and repair permissions. That should work even though the machine has Leopard on it.

Regards.

Thanks everyone

I ordered a 10.6 retail full install, to check the disk and probably nuke and pave.

I guess the 10.4 retail disk will not boot maybe because it's for PPC and not Intel version macs.

I did access the MBP hard drive by booting as a target disk and got the files off of the first partition but the other second partition does not show up? Can anyone tell me why? I would like to get the files off of it. In disk utility it shows the second volume as locked volume?

P.S. You are right about root permissions, because I was able to change some of the permissions in target disk mode back to "system" but would still not boot.

Thanks everyone

What a work around!?!

Here's what I did about getting my files off the MBP that won't start.

After booting the MBP in target disk mode the 1# partition mounts, the #2 partition does not. I loaded carbon copy cloner and made an image onto my working mac, I then opened the image. Yeah! there's all the files. Drag and Drop to my imac.

Hope this helps anyone in a pickle.