[al3kb]

My brother tried changing the short name on his Max Osx 10.5 (Leopard) and ended up losing all his files, now we are trying to retain all the lost files, though we cant because leopard doesnt let us change the folder names.
I tried using the following tutorial:
Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 or later: Return to default desktop, apparent "loss" of home directory

The error '"username" can't be modified or deleted because it is required by Mac OS X.' comes up.

Anyone have any ideas?

We had important business information so its very important we try to get our files back.
I was thinking of downgrading to Tiger changing the folder names in /user around then re-upgrading back to leopard. Does anyone know if this will work? Will anything be lost in the process of the downgrade? any thoughts or suggestions will be most appreciated, thanks.

[Gavin]

Don't panic. The files are probably still there. You may just have to use the terminal to rename 2 folders.

A couple quick questions to know how things stand.

You can log into the computer?

What do you see in the /Users folder?

[al3kb]

yes i can log in to the computer,

in /users i can see:

costa
Goran2
Roula
Shared

Goran 2 is the new short name created, costa was the old one.


When i log into the start up screen, there is Goran, Goran2, Roula and admin i think.

i tried looking for the invoices i have in a folder through spotlight and get it in a weird location, when i try to get there through finder i cant visibly get to this place. i took a screenshot of what comes up when i look for this file that was on my desktop before i tried the short-name change.
Here's the screeny.
ImageShack - Hosting :: picture2xr3.png


Thanks heaps for replying.

[Gavin]

Hmm.. looks like the "costa" folder is in the trash folder of Goran2.

so whatever you do - don't empty the trash!

any file or folder who's name starts with a period (.) is invisible in the finder. So you can't see .Trash

What was the order of events here?

You had an original short name? "costa"?
Then tried to change the name to Goran?

Then added a new user "Goran2", and that is who you are logged in as.


So the real question is: do you want to put it all back, or do you want to keep the users as is and move the old files into the new setup?

[al3kb]

yes i had the original name costa and yes i tried to change Goran, and then added a new user called Goran2.

There's nothing also in the trash, only the screeny which i posted up, i put it in the trash.

i dont mind what the name changes to at this point, i just want to get all my stuff back.

[analogika]

How did he change the short user name?

[al3kb]

i believe he did it through system preferences and then something in accounts and then screwed up, lol. I hope i get to fix this.

[Gavin]

OK, the screen shot indicates that the costa folder is in the trash. - maybe visible in the finder

so let's try something

open the terminal application - under /Applications/Utilities

type in
ls -l /Users/Goran2/.Trash/

hit return

see if there is a costa folder inside

also look in
ls -l /Users/costa/Desktop/

one of these should have your files
then we will move them to your new folder and fix the files' owner

[al3kb]

i tried typing applications in terminal but it said permission denied.

If you like you could add me on msn, my brothers msn is on here its goran300@yahoo.com.au

i have added a screenshot of what came up when i tried to access those folders in Terminal.

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture3qm6.png

If you could help me out through msn i would really appreciate it, thanks again for your help so far.

[Gavin]

oh sorry /Applications/Utilities is where terminal is - looks like you have it running

I don't have msn - I can do ichat and yahoo
with iChat on leopard I could just log in to your machine and fix it using remote desktop - probly take two minutes


what do you get for the other commands

ls -l /Users/Goran2/.Trash/

and

ls -l /Users/costa/Desktop/

if you get "permission denied" try it with sudo in front (it will ask for your password)

sudo ls -l /Users/costa/Desktop/

[al3kb]

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture5pe5.png

thats what i did, i'm not sure if i'm doing it right.

i have ichat too, the username we use here is,

goran300

just a thing to add, when i locate the file and double click on it i get a message, i have taken a screenshot, fix alias allows me to locate the file, but i cant find it anywhere, so i'm not sure if its actually in the trash can.

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture6ps0.png

[Gavin]

Hi

tried contacting on ichat and got this:

"Your message could not be sent. The user is not accepting offline message"

[Gavin]

the alias thing is interesting

the terminal pic shows you in a "costa"

I wonder if the folder called Gorna2 under Users is the old folder (which used to be called costa)

and the system created an empty costa folder when you logged in as costa because there was none with that name.

when you log in with a user name it wants a folder with that same name under Users

it could be that if you rename the "Gorna2" folder to "costa" then it will be back as it was.

[al3kb]

i posted in the Developer Section as you stated regarding the missing files, lets see how we go.

[Chuckit]

I don't doubt this can be fixed. We just need to figure out what happened in the first place. What does the Accounts pane in System Preferences show now? Also, when you're logged in as Goran2, which folder in Users has the icon that looks like a house?

[al3kb]

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture8yn7.png

here's a photo showing my system preferences/accounts.

The username with a house on it is Costa.

In that photo in the accounts Costa was renamed to Goran, so you cant see it under system preferences/accounts but when you go through finder and hard drive under accounts, costa has the house on it

thanks for your interest in this matter.


edit: i just ran Diskwarrior on my iMac and i got the following results, maybe this will mean something to you guys.

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture9ij1.png

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture10xi6.png

These are the results from the check all files & folders i did with disk warrior, i havent applied the Repair Disk Permissions yet, i'm not sure if i should, should i, or not?

Ta.

[Chuckit]

OK, so your user folder is still called "costa", but you don't see anything in it now? A couple more questions: When you log in as Goran2 and Roula, do those users properly have the "goran2" and "roula" folders with the house icon? And do you see any of the files when you log in as Goran2 or Roula (like maybe in the trash)?

[al3kb]

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture11lj9.png

the costa folder has hardly anything in it, out of those 1.53gb you see, 833mb are what i've downloaded today, the rest are random files. no where near the 90gb that was meant to be there.

edit: I just logged into Goran2 and Roula, they both have houses on them when i login to each one. Though they dont have as much files in their folders such as library as what Costa does, also under Goran2 and Roula, under users the costa folder has little red marks like stop signs which dont let you access the folder, i'm not sure what that means, maybe its been blocked or something.

I also noticed that the library folder was the only other one that had this sign under Goran2 when i was signed in on the Roula and the account i'm using now the normal Goran account which is really the costa account.

hope that helps.

[Chuckit]

OK, wherever those files are, they're apparently hiding pretty well. Let's try bringing out the big guns. In the /Applications/Utilities folder, there's a program called Directory Utility. Open that, and under the Edit menu, enable the Root User. The Root User is a special user who can see absolutely everything on the system. Once you've enabled it, log out and choose to log in as "Other" user. Type "root" in the name field and whatever password you chose in the password field. Then try searching for the files there. It should be able to find them wherever they are.

Just make sure you disable root in Directory Utility again once you've found what you're looking for, because having root enabled is a security vulnerability.

[Gavin]

Just for some more background info. We talked directly over skype and there is more to this than a simple short name change. It looks like he has some disk corruption. May have something to do with a very large file copy (100s of GB) in progress that was canceled. The disk shows there being lots of disk space used, but all the folders show up as empty. Disk utility fixed a couple of things but the files are still missing.

[Hal Itosis]

Guess it's too late for this: KBdoc#107854 ?
[save it for future reference in that case]

[Chuckit]

It was linked in the first post. It doesn't really apply to Leopard, since you can't rename your home directory anymore.

[Hal Itosis]

:embarrassed:

[al3kb]

ok i accessed root account and found allllllllllll the files.
Man i dont know how to thank you guys enough, seriously i really appreciate the help and wont forget this. A massive thankyou to Gavin and Chuckit for your big help and everyone else who showed interest. Now that i have found the missing files from the root login is there a way to get my computer back to how it was?

The only reason why i ask this is, because all my emails were set up and had some torrents half downloaded.

Thankyou very much again.

[Chuckit]

Where are the files now?

[al3kb]

i put them on the external hard drive, and they are still in the same place where they were before, they ended being in the same place where i was getting their alias search

ImageShack - Hosting :: picture2xr3.png

but were only able to be accessed through the root account.

Should i go back to the root account and copy them over to /user/Costa or Goran2 ?

Costa was the original where they were before all these problems

[Chuckit]

That's strange that somebody put them in the trash.

Anyway, yes, you should be OK copying the files back to the same places they were before. But make sure that Costa (or now Goran, I suppose) is the owner of the files (in the Get Info panel) before you try to log back in there. It will cause all kinds of weirdness if the user doesn't own his own settings files.

[al3kb]

yeah i ended up fixing it all up, root account is the master. ^^ thanks heaps mate for your help.

[Gavin]

Glad to hear you got it all back
- cheers