(stupid me) I changed the permissions on the HD

Well this is sort of a warning of sorts to those of you who (for any reason) change the permissions for the Macintosh HD to "Everyone: No Access"...

Not thinking straight this morning I was trying to get one folder to be shared from my Mac to my dads Win 7 laptop. Well when I enabled file sharing and shared only one folder, my entire HDD was shared, not a clue why but that's for another forum thread...

I changed the permission of Macintosh HD to Everyone: No access. Yes, that makes perfect sense, NOT! So I proceeded to log out, and then it just froze. My fans ramped up to full speed and I freaked. I forced it to power off. I then went through my brain trying to remember how to access the recovery area upon boot. No key combo I tried worked, UNTIL I had plugged in my recovery flash drive and then tried CMD+R again. I don't know if it ran off of the flash drive or if it somehow allowed my HDD to boot into recovery, I have no clue. I first tried repairing permissions on the drive through Disk Utility... That didn't work at all. Then I saw the option to recover from the Time Machine backup, so I did. What a relief!! It worked!!

Now I"m up and running again. Luckily I had a backup from about an hour before I screwed up the computer. So I didn't lose any data as far as I can tell.

So just a warning to you newbies (and perhaps not-so-newbies to the Mac world...) DON'T change the permissions of your main disk!! Now I just have to figure out how to properly network our computers.

xdunlapx said:

So just a warning to you newbies (and perhaps not-so-newbies to the Mac world...) DON'T change the permissions of your main disk!! Now I just have to figure out how to properly network our computers.

Click to expand...

I'd suggest that you never change permissions on anything ever unless you absolutely need to (and even then, do some searching). Second, if you try to change permissions on something and you get asked for a password, odds are that doing so will end in disaster.

Permissions are, at once, the best and worst part of Unix based operating system. It provides users with a tremendous amount of protection and control but can lead to disaster (as you saw). Don't worry, many of us who are familiar with permissions have been there at some point.

vansmith said:

I'd suggest that you never change permissions on anything ever unless you absolutely need to (and even then, do some searching). Second, if you try to change permissions on something and you get asked for a password, odds are that doing so will end in disaster.

Permissions are, at once, the best and worst part of Unix based operating system. It provides users with a tremendous amount of protection and control but can lead to disaster (as you saw). Don't worry, many of us who are familiar with permissions have been there at some point.

Click to expand...

Well, the sad thing is --- I used various Linux distributions 99% of the time (1% Windows) since 2002. I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing I guess since I was frustrated that the networking wasn't working properly. Oh man did I learn a lesson. Hahaha! I know permission issues due to working with Linux for so long. My brain just had a major fart. But I'm glad I had a backup. Phew!