Lost my only administrator account(not password, the whole account)

olssy

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I just bought a used Powerbook a few days ago and one of the first things I did was rename the adminstrator and change the password, that went fine until a few hours later I created a standard account with the same name. Now it seems as tho the administrator account has vanished, it no longer appears in the account information and is not available at boot time either. To make things worse, I cannot change the settings back as it asks me for an account name and password and the old one does not work, nor does the new one.

This wouldn't be too problematic except the Combo drive is broken so I cannot recover from the OS X cd.... I've checked arround in the terminal and from there I can see both accounts in the \Users directory, one belonging to the group "staff" and the other to "admin", both directorys are owned by the same user. My home directory is actually the directory belonging to the "admin" group. As a side note, the root account has not been activated yet, when I try to activate I am again prompted for the administrator name and password so I am unable to activate it.

I suspect the way to fix this would be to boot in single user mode and change the admin name, but I haven't got a clue how to do this. Any help would be really appreciated, thanks.
 
Hrm... mabe a sudo (with the old admin password)

sudo adduser
sudo passwd (account name)

I think Apple has a wierd way of dealing with accounts (or at least in 10.3)

I may be wrong but I think that Apple may have the accounts (even in client version) looking in OpenDirectory for account info. Somewhat buggy. Sorry if I am wrong about any of the info, & or if my info did not help in the least bit.

PS. Do not know how to change to single user mode, but I bet you can find it on the macosxhints website.
 
Thanks for the help but unfortunatly it didn't work. After typing in the password I receive the message "olssy(the user name I gave for both accounts) is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported", then I get "postdrop: warning: unable to look up public/pickup : No such file or directory"
Any info helps tho, thanks.
 
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