Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Ratatoskur · Oct 30, 2002, 09:44 PM

My friend asked me to help him go through his hard drive, delete unnecessary stuff and teach him also a little about Mac OS 10.2 that he recently installed on his computer.

Anyway, I did that and deleted a lot of old programs etc. etc. In the end there were just a few files and folders left. Some of them were folders that I remember from my computer and should be hidden as far as I can remember. These were: etc , var, automount, dev, tmp and then there was a file called "mach.sym".

I first tried making them Invisible with a program called Snax. That didn't however work. Then I saw that all these folders were in fact aliases so I thought, hey what harm could it do deleting aliases?

Then there was this file called "mach.sym" that I just put in another folder, I didn't think it would matter and my friends might accidentally delete it on his own.

Anyway, later I tried logging out and am suddenly greated by Mac OS X "Thank you for Installing Mac OS X" program and it wanted me to finish setup my Mac. I of course did not want to do that and restarted the computer.

Then, the grey Apple icon appeared and the spinning circle came and then on the top of the screen came this:

/etc/master.passwd: No such file or directory
sh-2,05a#

I then tried to enter the command "login" and this came: PAM Error, Critical Error - immediate abort

So what the hell just happened and how can I fix it? I guess it has something to do with the folders that I deleted even though they were clearly aliases.

I tried starting up the computer with a Mac OS 9 disk that I had with me but that didn't work. I then tried a Mac OS X Install disk and the Installer ran and it showed the hard drive and told me that Mac OS X was already installed on this hard drive.

So, do I have to install Mac OS X again or what ?
And if I do that what will happen to the files and programs in my friends Home folder ? Or have I perhaps damaged my friend's hard drive completely ?

Please help me...

BTW, my friend has an Indigo iMac with a CD drive running 10.2 and 9.2

moonmonkey · Oct 30, 2002, 10:14 PM

Is this a joke?

Ratatoskur · Oct 30, 2002, 10:15 PM

Not really....

moonmonkey · Oct 30, 2002, 10:41 PM

Originally posted by Ratatoskur:
Not really....

OK, just checking, you should reintall using the archive option, it should preserve your user folders and give you a new system.

You may have to reset the password using the intaller disk.

(Just my opinion!)

yuriwho · Oct 30, 2002, 10:45 PM

Just reboot from the 10.2 cd and choose to install the os over the previous os. Do not reformat the drive, select an easy update (the default selection) and it should fix everything you messed up and keep all of his user data intact. He should just be able to login as usual after this fix. In OS X you should not touch anything other than /Users and /Library until you know what you are doing. All those aliases etc. are important.

Y

Brass · Oct 30, 2002, 11:18 PM

Originally posted by yuriwho:
Just reboot from the 10.2 cd and choose to install the os over the previous os. Do not reformat the drive, select an easy update (the default selection) and it should fix everything you messed up and keep all of his user data intact. He should just be able to login as usual after this fix. In OS X you should not touch anything other than /Users and /Library until you know what you are doing. All those aliases etc. are important.

Y

This is correct. And the reason that they have such important aliases, instead of just relying on the plain files is that it's trying to be a good Unix citizen as well as a user-friendly-mac-like system. It keeps all the originals in the /System directory, except that one file you found, which needs the original in the root (/) directory. However, many Unix components and utilities expects to find things like /etc /var and so on in the root directory, so links to the originals in /System are kept in / (root directory).

gadster · Oct 31, 2002, 10:10 AM

Can I just say... don't treat OS 10 like it's OS 9, ever. Leave stuff alone, just do what you need to do with your apps and don't use Techtools, Nortons or any other cr**. Just don't even go digging around looking for stuff to delete. If you want to delete stuff, make some files and delete them. Just for fun. But leave things alone, you have plenty of HD space, what's the problemo?