Locked out of user account

Hi, guys,

Earlier today I had somewhat of a brain explosion. Yes, I deleted my "private" folder in the hope of freeing up some of the 20GB it was taking up. Silly, I know. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. And besides – 20GB!

So. After some forum-prowling I discovered the best and essentially the only course of action considering my mac wouldn't get past the grey logo-screen was to re-install OSX via DVD, which I've done and now I'm back up and running.. with one small problem.

I can't access my old and cherished user account. This is going to have most of you tut-tutting, but I've never been a Time Machine user and as such it would seem I can't use migration assistant to hook back into my old user profile. However, all my stuff is still there – the movies, documents, everything. But my old user folder is not being recognised as such; instead, it's just a regular folder (which means it's not picked up in the "Users" pane of system preferences) and all the sub-folders are locked.

All my stuff is there – there is the exact same amount of space on my hard disk as there was before this fiasco. All my applications are still installed and functional from what I can tell.

Can anyone tell me how can I get my precious user profile (not to mention all my documents) back?

Many thanks in advance.

Hope this will help:
Mac OS X: How to recover a home folder (directory)
Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Restoring a deleted user account

Thanks for the tip.. but there is no "deleted users" folder. In fact, my original user is still sitting in the root "Users" folder but not being recognised as such.

If your account no longer appears in the System Preferences->Accounts pane, create a new user, check the box to make it an administrator, make sure the short name is identical to the name of your folder in /Users, and the system should prompt you "A folder by that name already exists. Do you want to link it to this account?" Click Yes, and it should absorb your home folder and set you up again.

Good idea! The only problem is that I can't seem to create my old username because it has spaces in it (Danny Boy Master). When I try creating a new username, it won't allow spaces (DannyBoyMaster) and underscores don't work either. Eek! Is there a way I can change this afterward, i.e not through System Prefs?

EvenStranger said:

If your account no longer appears in the System Preferences->Accounts pane, create a new user, check the box to make it an administrator, make sure the short name is identical to the name of your folder in /Users, and the system should prompt you "A folder by that name already exists. Do you want to link it to this account?" Click Yes, and it should absorb your home folder and set you up again.

Click to expand...

Even if I could work out the spacing issue, I've done a test by setting up two identical accounts, and it just says "This username is taken". Nothing about fantastic absorbtion. Ah! This is getting a tad desperate. Any other ideas, team?