EMERGENCY need help NOW

Guys- I have been on Macs for a while now, so I consider myself a pretty experienced user, however there are still some things that I do not know..

To the point- my room mate needed to use my computer to type a paper. He is not mac-experienced, so I was afraid of him either messing up some settings and or looking through my files.
I had to disable my password for him to access my computer, so feeling vulnerable, I tried to put a lock somehow on my hard drive.
FIRST: I changed ownership to myself, as opposed to 'system'
THEN: I changed access to 'no access' (thinking you would need my password to access the HD)
After that, all desktop icons dissapear, and the computer freezes. Now when I log into my username, a blank blue screen appears!!@
I may be a huge idiot, but I did not know this was going to happen!
Is there ANY way to be able to change the file access permission back? Or is there a way to log in from an administrator? (no admin name appears at login, only line)
Or can I boot from the disk and somehow change something?
Please help! I have +2 years worth of work that I NEED

Thanks in advance,
-Kevin

MUMacUser said:

Guys- I have been on Macs for a while now, so I consider myself a pretty experienced user, however there are still some things that I do not know..

To the point- my room mate needed to use my computer to type a paper. He is not mac-experienced, so I was afraid of him either messing up some settings and or looking through my files.
I had to disable my password for him to access my computer, so feeling vulnerable, I tried to put a lock somehow on my hard drive.
FIRST: I changed ownership to myself, as opposed to 'system'
THEN: I changed access to 'no access' (thinking you would need my password to access the HD)
After that, all desktop icons dissapear, and the computer freezes. Now when I log into my username, a blank blue screen appears!!@
I may be a huge idiot, but I did not know this was going to happen!
Is there ANY way to be able to change the file access permission back? Or is there a way to log in from an administrator? (no admin name appears at login, only line)
Or can I boot from the disk and somehow change something?
Please help! I have +2 years worth of work that I NEED

Thanks in advance,
-Kevin

Click to expand...

you can boot off of cd and repair permissions. I don't know if this will help or not but worth a try. Just boot off the cd and and when its booted instead of installing pick the disk utiltiy from the installer menu in the menubar.


Next time you may be better off just creating this person a guest acct.

MUMacUser said:

Guys- I have been on Macs for a while now, so I consider myself a pretty experienced user, however there are still some things that I do not know..

To the point- my room mate needed to use my computer to type a paper. He is not mac-experienced, so I was afraid of him either messing up some settings and or looking through my files.
I had to disable my password for him to access my computer, so feeling vulnerable, I tried to put a lock somehow on my hard drive.
FIRST: I changed ownership to myself, as opposed to 'system'
THEN: I changed access to 'no access' (thinking you would need my password to access the HD)
After that, all desktop icons dissapear, and the computer freezes. Now when I log into my username, a blank blue screen appears!!@
I may be a huge idiot, but I did not know this was going to happen!
Is there ANY way to be able to change the file access permission back? Or is there a way to log in from an administrator? (no admin name appears at login, only line)
Or can I boot from the disk and somehow change something?
Please help! I have +2 years worth of work that I NEED

Thanks in advance,
-Kevin

Click to expand...

Are you still at least making it to the desktop, even if you do not have access to anything. That will make things a little simpler. If not you will need to boot into single user mode. Everything else below is the same though.

I don't think repair permissions will work, but it might be wirth a try. If you have already tried or don't want to risk it continue on...

See if you can get a terminal open. if you can, "cd /Users" to get to the users directory and do a "ls -l". What we are trying to figure out is who has access to your directory and how much access they have.

once we know that we'll get a root shell so we can change things with impunity "sudo bash" then your password. now let's fix ownership "chown -R <name>:<name> ./<name>" where you replace <name with your user name. make sure you are in the Users folder and that you type that command in correctly root has a lot of power to screw things up. So as an example if my user name were meg I would use "chown -R meg:meg ./meg"

So now we have fixed ownership, next let's fix permissions. "chmod -R 700 ./<name>" replacing name and showing the same cuation as before. This does not fix your permissions, but it will let you login again. Once that is done reboot and see if you login OK. If ou do ping us back and we can see about setting permissions for all your directories. That will be a lot of work though unfortunately, unless someone else can chime in . I am a *nix guy at heart so I don't know all the tricks Macs have around.

Once you have it fixed, create a new user called guest and put a password on it and then tell your roommate the password. Give that user limited permissions and your account will be perfectly safe and only those that know the password to the guest account will be able to use your computer.. again with limited permissions. And you can change the password periodically... a little safer then what you did

I cannot get to a desktop.

When I log into my username, its just the base blue graphic background that you get when you install OSX.

...?

AND how do you boot to a single user mode?

When I try getting to cd /Users from the terminal when booting from the Tiger CD, it says "no such file or directory"

I personally have an account called "failsafe" with admin rights and a very difficult password. I never use this account. It is just in case I manage to bollix one of my primary accounts up bad enough to make it non operational. Just an idea.

EDIT:
Single User Mode:
http://www.westwind.com/reference/OS-X/commandline/single-user.html

Go into single user mode, "fsck -y" then "mount -uw /" you should then be able to follow what I listed above.

EDIT2: I have never gone into Single User Mode on a Mac before so I am relying on websites to get you to a command prompt where we can proceed.


EDIT3: If you are in Single User Mode there is no need so "sudo bash" by the way, you should already be root.

"disk1s3: device is write locked."

Edit: That is when I try "mount -uw /"

fsck -y gives me this:
/dev/rdisk1s3 (NO WRIRE)
Then it goes on to check the OS X install DVD

Boot without the DVD in the drive.

Is there any way that I can partition the disk and somehow install another copy of OSX then try and change the write permissions on the other portion of the disk with all my files??
Man this sucks.

Trying.

Your disk in general is fine, it just can not login as the default user you set up. If we can get that disk mounted things get a lot simpler. If you have another Mac target disk mode is another option but I do not know if that will work properly. Single user mode is definitely the best option we have right now.

localhost:/Users root# ls -l
total 16
-rw-rw-r-- 1 501 admin 6148 Nov 10 15:01 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 20 2005 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 5 root wheel 170 Feb 7 12:52 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 23 501 501 782 Feb 22 20:23 kevintrump

kevintrump = me / username

Am I cleared to go ahed and follow the rest of your list?

GREAT!!! sort of.

Just do a "chown -R kevintrump:kevintrump ./kevintrump"

Do not bother with a chmod for now. See if that lets you in.

EDIT: Afterwards it should read

drwxr-xr-x 23 kevintrump kevintrump 782 Feb 22 20:23 kevintrump

The permissions are much looser than what I was setting them to, but they will do to get you back in operation.

When I type that command, I get
chown: kevintrump: Invalid argument

...?

That does present a problem...

It just means the username is not the full "kevintrump", Either that or since lookupd is not running it can not resolve the name... passwd and groups only contains system accounts in OS X, not normal users, so I am not sure how to look up the name or ID.

try running "sh /etc/rc " then redo the chown command.

I would need to boot into Single User Mode to be certain though. I might try if that does not work.

Kokopelli said:

That does present a problem...

try running "sh /etc/rc " then redo the chown command.

I would need to boot into Single User Mode to be certain though. I might try if that does not work.

Click to expand...

I did that ^

It loaded for a few seconds, then I ran the user list command again, and now I get this:
total 1192
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kevintru admin 6148 Nov 10 15:01 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 20 2005 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 5 root wheel 170 Feb 7 12:52 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 23 kevintru kevintru 782 Feb 22 20:23 kevintrump
-r--r--r-- 1 root admin 598864 Mar 3 18:38 mach.sym

So- I tried rebooting and logging in to my name- logged in, and just got the blank blue background again...

Also- Is there a way to restart from single user mode without turning the power off?

MUMacUser said:

I did that ^

It loaded for a few seconds, then I ran the user list command again, and now I get this:
total 1192
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kevintru admin 6148 Nov 10 15:01 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 20 2005 .localized
drwxrwxrwt 5 root wheel 170 Feb 7 12:52 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 23 kevintru kevintru 782 Feb 22 20:23 kevintrump
-r--r--r-- 1 root admin 598864 Mar 3 18:38 mach.sym

So- I tried rebooting and logging in to my name- logged in, and just got the blank blue background again...

Also- Is there a way to restart from single user mode without turning the power off?

Click to expand...

Not that I know of no.

Well it means there is some subdirectory that you do not seem to have access to. Do you want to do this the long way or the short way?

Short way "chmod -R u+rwx ./kevintrump" This gives the owner read write and execute rights to all files in the kevintrump directory and all subdirectories. It does not otherwise change permissions, which is better than the way I was having you do it before.

Long way "cd kevintrump" then "ls -l" and see what directories:
1) are not owned by you (there should be none at this stage)
2) you do not have rights to (all directories should start with drwx in the rights column)

And we fix the directories one at a time. You lost rights to something. You are sure you changed permission only to stuff in your home directory, yes?

Kokopelli said:

Not that I know of no.

Well it means there is some subdirectory that you do not seem to have access to. Do you want to do this the long way or the short way?

Short way "chmod -R u+rwx ./kevintrump" This gives the owner read write and execute rights to all files in the kevintrump directory and all subdirectories. It does not otherwise change permissions, which is better than the way I was having you do it before.

Long way "cd kevintrump" then "ls -l" and see what directories:
1) are not owned by you (there should be none at this stage)
2) you do not have rights to (all directories should start with drwx in the rights column)

And we fix the directories one at a time. You lost rights to something. You are sure you changed permission only to stuff in your home directory, yes?

Click to expand...

What I did, I did by clicking 'get info' on the hard drive icon. So I don't know about only the home directory, but maybe the whole hard drive.. Hopefully that doesn't royally screw me.