Please help...no GUI...

Here is the situation. I was setting up a student user account on a public computer. I didn't want that account to have access to the startup disk, applications, utilities etc... What i did was highlight the disk, get info, and changed the "others" field to no access. Now when I start the computer it goes straight to command line. Now I don't know what to do. I don't have the install disk, I have #2 and #3, but that doesn't help. Can somebody please advise me on how to get osx back without losing all the settings and applications? All input is appreciated. Thank you.

try starting it up and holding down apple+s and when it boots up there will be a bunch of lines of text on a black screen.

when you see the prompt where you can type. type fsck -fy
let that run.
when it finishes, type reboot

when I turn the computer on it starts to show the loading window and then fades out and goes black w/ "darwin/bsd" name of my computer and asks for login info. I can log into single user mode, which I did, ran fsck and it showed that the drive had been repaired. But when I reboot it does the same thing. I can't find any info on this. It happened right after I changed the permissions on the start up disk. Any other ideas? Anyone know how to reset permissions on the drive via command line?

Welcome to Mac-Forums, wsphoto.

For changing the permissions via Terminal, check this Apple Knowledge Base article, Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X. Read the whole article to understand what exactly are permissions in OS X and to change them in Terminal, look closely at the Viewing and Changing Permissions With Terminal section.

Hope this helps.

MacHeadCase said:

Welcome to Mac-Forums, wsphoto.

For changing the permissions via Terminal, check this Apple Knowledge Base article, Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X. Read the whole article to understand what exactly are permissions in OS X and to change them in Terminal, look closely at the Viewing and Changing Permissions With Terminal section.

Hope this helps.

Click to expand...

It says to navigate to the directory where the file or folder exists, but it's my startup disk. How do I navigate to that?

This topic sure is shortened humorously

wsphoto said:

It says to navigate to the directory where the file or folder exists, but it's my startup disk. How do I navigate to that?

Click to expand...

I would guess you need to repair your own directory. This might help.

now the folder icon with flashing ? comes up before redirecting me to the "darwin" black screen. I think this is just getting worse.

A little more info; I ran var/log/system.log and there was a huge list. After about 5 minutes of scrolling down I found the end, where a few lines up from the bottom it showed:
Local Host login window [436]: Login Authorization failed (-600008)!
Local Host login window [436]: AuthorizationRef doesn't have a user name
Local Host login window [436]: exiting to console


I'm not familiar with the how to read computer jargon, but it seems that this describes the point where the login window would appear, but goes black and shows a command line asking me for my username and password. I can login on this screen. Does this shed any light? Any suggestions? Sorry about all the questions, but i'm going crazy and it definately isn't a good thing if I have to reinstall the os and set it up with all the software again.

And this:

crashdump: Finished writing crash report to: /library/logs/crashreporter/securityagent/crash.log

????

YEEESSSS!!!! I repaired the permissions via sudo diskutil repairpermissions / and it worked! I tried that this morning though and didn't seem to do much then. Oh man..i'll never do that again. Thanks for the responses everyone. Now can someone delete this thread and stop the embarrasment

Glad the problem is solved.