MAJOR Shortname/Admin/User Problem

C

cozbaldwin

Registered
I've never quite screwed anything up this bad before. For now, let's try not to concentrate on WHY I did these things... just that they're already done... and I severely regret them.

This is my work computer, which also holds many personal files.
I am running 10.4.11 on a G5 PowerPC
There was only ever one user account on the machine.

I went to change the short name using Netinfo Manager.
I changed the "name" and "home" to reflect the changes I wanted.
For the sake of this example, let's say the original name was "WORK" and I changed it to "Coz". So, "home" is now labeled as "/Users/Coz"

This of course wiped out the profile I've been using all along, created what appears to be a new Home account by the name of "Coz" and no other user can be selected at startup. In Preferences/Accounts, there's only this one -- and it's a Standard User. I have no admin rights because there appears to not be an admin password/name anymore.

But...

I can see my old files and everything still exist in the directory "/Users/WORK" -- yay. they're where they're supposed to be.

I just need to get WORK to be considered the home account again and make sure it's got admin rights. But that's hard to do when no one has admin rights at the moment.

Puhleez. Help.
 
Thanks for all your hard work, ...
but I've already googled for hours and nothing seems to totally apply to me.

These instructions you led me to do not apply because they tell me to enable the root user. My Netinfo Manager has greyed out the option to Enable Root User.

It later instructs to add a new user.
I can't do that without admin rights.

Later in the article they mention this command in Terminal:
Type: chown -R <new_name> /Users/<new_name>
I've tried that and the response i get back is "Invalid argument"
 
Maybe you can try this script, I've used it several times without any problems.

http://www.danfrakes.com/

Select ChangeShortName from the sidebar menu.

Your best bet might be to change shortname back to what it was, and start over again.
 
So far I haven't been of much help eh!
Have you checked this...?
System Preferences > Accounts. Check box "Allow user to administrate computer
 
jbarley said:
So far I haven't been of much help eh!
Have you checked this...?
System Preferences > Accounts. Check box "Allow user to administrate computer
Click to expand...

Cant even get that far. Unlocking the padlock required admin pass. The checkbox you refer to is greyed out.
 
Man. this is a tough one.
Maybe try booting your Tiger install disk, I seem to recall an item in the Utility menu for resetting or changing passwords.

I'm surprised that those wiser then me, haven't jumped in on this topic...
 
I was trying that but the disc wouldnt boot properly. Kept going to command prompt but ending with the line: panic: we're hanging here...

But guess what - another forum was able to assist!

http://www.hackmac.org/?q=node/4 did the trick.

With that "hack", i was able to create a new user, an admin. Since it didn't wipe clean the data, i still had my old user on there. I made him an admin.
NOW, I could go in and edit those two areas in NetInfo Manager back to what they were. Whew. Now ive got two admin accounts and the original, so far, seems just the way I left it.

Hale-frikken-lujia.

I appreciate your time and energy, though. Sincerely. It was a tough one.
 
Little late to the party i know. But this is a common problem with users trying to alter things such as short name in netinfomgr. You could have booted to the installer and enabled root, then went and made the rest of the changes in netinfomgr, then made the account admin again.
 
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