Messed up my wife's Mac Mini

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Today I tried to set permissions on my wife’s mac mini HD (Snow Leopard) to be read and write accessible to ‘everyone’ and clicked the option for it to ‘apply to enclosed items’, after which I got the horizontal barber poll, and after about 15 minutes got a pop-up alert that something wasn’t installed correctly (I really don’t remember what it said), and when I clicked to close it, there was another similar alert about a different file/extension, then another, and another. Clearly my trying to set the permissions that way had caused all these alerts. After clicking out of about 40 of the alerts, I decided to just force shut down the machine, and I haven’t been able to get it to boot up normally since. I get the logo screen with spinner and it never goes any further. I have a Windows Boot Camp partition and I can boot into that and work in Windows just fine.

Here’s what I tried to no avail:

Safe Boot – I get the progress bar under the logo, which gets to about half-way then disappears and nothing more happens.

Booted into Single User Mode and ran /sbin/fsck –fy. Got “Macintosh HD appears OK”

Booted to the install CD, which is OS 10.4.10, and ran disk utilities to repair disk, verify disk, repair permissions, verify permissions with all checking ‘ok’.

Reset the PRAM several times in a row.

Tried to reset nonvolatile firmware, and I just get the logo and spinner – no command line prompt.

The only other suggestion I’ve found it to “test the kernel” by reinstalling the OS. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the Snow Leopard upgrade disk, and if I were to reinstall, would that delete all my files on the HD?

Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated as I am typing this from the proverbial doghouse.

Thank you, Scott
 

RavingMac

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I can answer one question, but can't get you out of the doghouse.

If you can get your Snow Leopard DVD you can safely reinstall the OS without losing files (hopefully); just choose to reinstall without erasing.

Having said that, things can always go wrong. For that reason it is a good idea to have and maintain a current backup.
 
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thank you for that! If I can't find my Snow Leopard disk, can I reinstall using my OS X Leopard disc with the option to "not erase"?

Appreciate the help - thanks.
 

RavingMac

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Possibly . . . If you are currently running Snow Leopard it may balk at a version downgrade without a reformat. Haven't tried that before.
Apple online will sell you a replacement Snow Leopard disk if you call them.
 
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Not really as it will install Leopard not Snow Leopard and you may then be further in the mire. Suggest keep looking or purchase as Razormac has suggested.
 
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Thank you, I will DEFINITELY not try to reinstall anything other than SL.

I should also mention that I have an iMac with SL, if that opens any possibilities.
 

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Thank you, I will DEFINITELY not try to reinstall anything other than SL.

I should also mention that I have an iMac with SL, if that opens any possibilities.

Unfortunately not, unless your iMac came with an earlier OS and you upgraded it with Retail disks. The disks that come with your Mac (gray/silver) are machine specific and will only work on the model they came with.
 
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Hi Razormac. Actually, I upgraded both the mini and the iMac with the same SL disc, so does that open a possibility?
 

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Hi Razormac. Actually, I upgraded both the mini and the iMac with the same SL disc, so does that open a possibility?

Absolutely . . . disk will be white and should with no problem
 

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