Need administrator privlages ....

Ok,

I'm having some weird problems all of a sudden with my install of Panther.
Just recently, Ive been getting some weird errors that i have not encountered before, because i am the admin / only user of the computer. Just recently there was an airport extreme update in software update.. i went to install it, just so everything is up to date. after it finishes downloading and gets ready to install, i get this error here . " The update "airport extreme driver update 2005-001" could not be verified and expanded correctly, Make sure you have permissions to write to /private/tmp/501/TemporaryItems/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate, Then try again"

I didn't think much of it, i don't have an airport extreme, (on ibook g3) so i didn't sweat it any, but then a couple days later i went to install some drivers for my printer, since i just repaired it i was going to test it out (the printer) so i go and down load the drivers, i start to install it, and then i get this error after i put the password in, "The software to be installed requires Administrator or higher level access privileges."
I then think to myself something weird is going on here, i said forget it because the printer is not that important, i don't like the hunk of junk anyway... but that aside...

I then today proceeded to reinstall Dreamweaver MX 2004, I'll start installing and then it'll ask for my password like usual, i put it in and then i get this error again "The software to be installed requires Administrator or higher level access privileges."
I don't know what to do, so i repaired permissions and tried again, it didn't do anything, so i am baffled, i don't know what is going on, i have not had any of these problems and they all of a sudden arise, i am the admin of the computer, i don't have any other users on here. no one else uses the computer but me and i use it everyday, hopefully you guys could help me out. thanks

try repairing disks on your boot cd? the only thing i can think of

hey, good idea.. i did it, but it didn't help , thanks though.

can't think of anything else and you've probably checked this but 1/ do you have multiple accounts? and if so 2/make sure that your account is enabled as the administrator in system preferences/accounts

yeah, i did that too.. no avail, thanks though.

well, well, guess what.

I just ran into some more problems, i now cannot create archives of things, when i go to zip something, it will say. "The archive bill of materials cannot be created." i don't know what the heck is going on, and also it does not see my camera anymore, it will mount it like usual and i can open the camera and so on, but using image capture it will no longer allow me to pull the pictures off, it says no device is connected, and iphoto does not recognize it, i don't know what is going on with my poor mac.. all of a sudden it's like spontaneous permission loss or something, and i have no clue as how this could have happened. i haven't changed anything or done anything out of the ordinary.. does anyone have any ideas as to what is going on ? . I'm afraid I'm going to have to back everything up and reinstall..

well, you could always go to apple, or a computer store, as much as i hate to say it...

Ghostshadow said:

I'm afraid I'm going to have to back everything up and reinstall..

Click to expand...

Probably. But before you do you try to analyze it a bit.

Go into the Utilities folder and start NetInfo Manager. Navigate to /users/<yourusername> and check that the uid is 501. It will be if you have been the only user on the box. I can't see how that would get out of sync so I expect it to be fine. I think the gid you see should be 20, but it might be 501. I'm not sure because I have customized mine over the years.

Then navigate to /groups/admin and see if your username is listed along with root. If not then maybe the only way to fix that is to start up in single user mode and applying appropriate black magic. Maybe via niutil.

Open Terminal and check who owns the files in your folder via "ls -l". On the lines it likely says your name and and to the right of that, staff or you name again. Are any not that.

Use the touch command to create an empty file and see who owns it. Just type "touch myrandomfile;ls -l myrandomfile;rm myrandomfile".


If all the above is fine, then backup and reinstall, because something is askew.

Oh, have you restarted since doing that update? Maybe that would help. Backup first though.

Good luck getting it back on track.