- Joined
- Sep 30, 2006
- Messages
- 16
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- Location
- auchenflower, qld
- Your Mac's Specs
- macbook pro unibody 15", 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
I have OS 10.4.10 on a 15" Macboook Pro that's about a month old. It's my second MBP. This afternoon I went to use an account that I use quite often to do my music stuff. The account had disappeared from the machine! The user is not in the 'switch users' drop down off the right top menu next to spotlight icon. I can't login from the login panel either.
The files were still there (phew!) and I copied the whole user's directory onto a backup disk. Being familiar with Unix systems, I get a terminal open and look at the user's directory in /Users I can see that that the directory permissions have reverted to a numeric ID rather than the user's name. The group id is OK though (i.e. not numeric).
So thinking that I could perhaps just recreate the user and copy all the files back into the new user's directory or something, I tried to run the Accounts system preference and see what I could salvage. But the accounts system preference panel is blank!
I rebooted a couple of times, tried again, this situation continued. OK the Accounts subsystem or whatever is obviously totally hosed. So I thought lets try to reinstall the system and Accounts system should be reinstalled, right?
I dragged the system disks out, rebooted, checked the disk (all OK), and re-installed the operating system. Obviously not a clean install. Two hours later (groan) and all is over, you beauty I think, log back in, go to run the Account system preference panel ... the situation continues!
What can I do now? Has anyone got any good ideas? I am desperate!
thanks
scot
The files were still there (phew!) and I copied the whole user's directory onto a backup disk. Being familiar with Unix systems, I get a terminal open and look at the user's directory in /Users I can see that that the directory permissions have reverted to a numeric ID rather than the user's name. The group id is OK though (i.e. not numeric).
So thinking that I could perhaps just recreate the user and copy all the files back into the new user's directory or something, I tried to run the Accounts system preference and see what I could salvage. But the accounts system preference panel is blank!
I rebooted a couple of times, tried again, this situation continued. OK the Accounts subsystem or whatever is obviously totally hosed. So I thought lets try to reinstall the system and Accounts system should be reinstalled, right?
I dragged the system disks out, rebooted, checked the disk (all OK), and re-installed the operating system. Obviously not a clean install. Two hours later (groan) and all is over, you beauty I think, log back in, go to run the Account system preference panel ... the situation continues!
What can I do now? Has anyone got any good ideas? I am desperate!
thanks
scot