HELP! I've messed up!

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Hi guys! I'm not really that tech savvy, so my problem is probably an easy fix; I just don't know how to do it. I have an iBook OS X 10.4.8


Okay, so I think I've created two different users on my mac. To make a long story short, can I reset my settings to last week and act like it never happened? Or do I need to do something else? Because I've lost all of my iTunes music, and desktop icons, and such.

I don't know what to do, and any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you for your time!
 
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cjrobbins, sorry to hear you are having issues... but nonetheless, welcome to Mac Forums! Hopefully we can help.

Now, I don't know of any way to go back a week - at least not until Leopard with its Time Machine backup comes out. In the meantime, lets hope that you haven't really lost those files - you just can't find them.

Open a Finder window. Click on Macintosh HD and then Users. Do you see both of the userids you created? Do you perhaps see another userid - your original one? Can you see your iTunes stuff in any of them?

Report back and we will take it step by step.
 
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Thanks for helping me out!

Okay, so I open up a finder window and click on my hard drive. I open up the Users folder and see the two user folders. When I click on the original account, I can see what used to be on my desktop. So how do I make that the primary one?
 
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Hey cjrobbins, Welcome to M-F.

Well, I don't really understand what exactly you did with the 2 users you created. Did you delete them afterwards? How did you lose your iTunes music by creating new users.

When you create new users they get separate user folders and the corresponding iTunes music is saved under /HD/Users/<Username>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (if you didn't change default settings)
If you want to access to music saved under a certain user, you should login to his/her account. I would suggest you to login to the user you saved your music and do a spotlight search.
 
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If you create a new user account your itunes library will not automatically be transferred
 
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Hey novicew. Yeah, it's pretty complicated. I don't know what I was thinking!

In the finder window, in the hard drive area, I went to Users and my account. I don't know why, but I decided I wanted to change the name. When I changed it, it created a new folder with the new name. Once again, I don't know why, I kinda freaked and changed it back to the original name. But the new file was still there. I hope this makes sense (sorry!)

So, I decided to restart my computer and just login into the new account, right? Well when my password screen came up, it only had one account (the one with all the stuff missing).
 
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click logout if it automatically logs in

Otherwise search for your old account using finder, there has to be traces of it within your HDD
Did you notice about 2 -4 free up or however big your collection is you will notice this on space left on disk if so i have a feeling your music is gone
 
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I logged out, but it still just only shows one account and won't let me do anything unless I log into it. Yeah, I think most of it is gone now, because I gained about 25Gb back. Man, that sucks. That's what happens when you mess around I guess!

Thanks for all the help guys! I appreciate it!
 
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Install Disk Inventory X and run it to see where all the files are. Once you locate them, let us know whether you have access to the Folder.
 
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It's okay, the only thing I'll be missing is school stuff (assignments and such). And I can upload my music from my iPod, so it's not really that big of a deal now. Heck, maybe it's just a blessing in disguise? I mean, it did clear my hard drive out, you know?

Thanks for all the help guys! I'm not freaking out anymore, and I gotta go to class.

Thanks again!
 
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You may want to try the following; warning- make sure that you type it right. This process will take all of your original account's data and overwrite your current account's data.

In my example I use AUSER for your first account name, BUSER for your second (replace with your users' short names):

1. Open Terminal
2. Type sudo su and enter your password.
3. Type chown -R BUSER ../AUSER/*.*
4. Type cp -Rf ../AUSER/ .
5. Logout and back in as the new user.

It is a bit complicated- you may want to ask someone familiar with Unix to help you out.
 
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cjrobbins, all may not be lost. You said:

Okay, so I open up a finder window and click on my hard drive. I open up the Users folder and see the two user folders. When I click on the original account, I can see what used to be on my desktop. So how do I make that the primary one?
So, it appears that you can still see the original account. Is your iTunes music and homework stuff still in there? If so, you can drag it over to your current account. You haven't succeeded in changing the name back, but you have recovered your stuff.

Does that work?
 
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I did this samething in december. I changed my home folder(in the finder window) from steve strain into dadsgravy. It made two users in the same account and pretty much split everything in two. When I tried to move everything back to the steve strain folder, it made everything worse. It pretty much turned osx into a well shuffled deck of cards. A lot of my itunes music just disappeared. I really couldn't explain what happened. The whole computer went ballistic just from changing my name.
The only solution I found was to re-install tiger and start over with a new computer.
I know this doesn't help your problem, I just thought i'd let you know that your not alone.

And on another note, I am new to mac, but I am far from being computer illiterate. In my opinion, i think that this is a serious flaw in osx. You should be able to change the name of your home folder, with in finder, without osx going postal.
 
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Thanks for all the feedback. I ended up just deleting the old user name entirely. Some things showed up and others didn't, like dadsgravy said, "it was like a well shuffled deck of cards." Bummer, but what can you do? It'll be nice once Leopard comes out and you can easily fix this type of thing.

Once again, thanks for all the help!
 

rman


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it appear that you found out the hard way. Don't change the name of your home folder/directory. As you can see it cause you major problem. When you change the name of your home folder, shut down the system. The system get confused when it can not find your home folder, so it creates a new one for you.
 

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