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Urgent!!

mmmdreg

mmmdreg

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 14, 2002
1,393
0
Sydney, Australia
I had a users partition and a OSX partition...I wiped the OSX partition after backing up only the appz because I assumed all the settings would be in the Users folders but I was being stupid...so I got these users in my users folder but they don't appear as users but just folders because I got rid of this file/s of mine...If I get that file from the computer I'm using right now, I'm assuming that all the Users will return to the users list? is this true? please help
 
cb911

cb911

macrumors 601
Mar 12, 2002
4,128
4
BrisVegas, Australia
so you had two partitions, OS X and then all of your stuff on another partition?

i'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but it's worth giving it a try. couldn't hurt.:)
 
evildead

evildead

macrumors 65816
Jun 18, 2001
1,275
0
WestCost, USA
hmmmm

you saved all the users home diectories but you didnt save the shadow and group files. What you need to do is grab the folwing files off a machine that has all the users that you had on your mac that you wiped out.


/etc/shadow
/etc/group
/etc/passwd

That should work.... you post is a little unclear so I cant tell if you have a way to get these files or not. Next time, back up these files if your going to do something like that again and you want to maintain the same users information. You can just create new users with the same names, and just copy over all the users stuff... but that might take a while and you have to worrie about permissions and ownership of files.

-evildead
 
mmmdreg

mmmdreg

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 14, 2002
1,393
0
Sydney, Australia
evildead (or anyone else), is there any other hidden files that ought to be copied considering I'll be reinstalling all the appz and just want to have a working computer?
 
Doctor Q

Doctor Q

Administrator
Staff member
Sep 19, 2002
39,782
7,514
Los Angeles
I'm a little confused about your situation, but I'll point out something in case it helps. Files /etc/shadow and /etc/group and /etc/passwd hold the Unix-level boot-time user definitions, such as the System Administrator. But information about the users who login to Mac OS (the GUI interface) from the login screen is not stored there.

Information about Mac OS users is stored in the NetInfo database, which resides in your OS X partition. You should not normally copy, back up, or restore the NetInfo files directly. It is better to use the intended System Preference panes to define users and login screen behavior. In extreme cases, you can edit the NetInfo database using the NetInfo Manager application (in /Applications/Utilities).
 
evildead

evildead

macrumors 65816
Jun 18, 2001
1,275
0
WestCost, USA
Originally posted by mmmdreg
evildead (or anyone else), is there any other hidden files that ought to be copied considering I'll be reinstalling all the appz and just want to have a working computer?
Click to expand...

You will want to copy the /Libraies folder and the ~/Libraries folders in each of the users home (~) directories. Witch im guessing your all ready doing. There are some things under /Libraires like the preffrences folder and the Application suport folder. If you dont care about those things and your doing fresh installs of all your apps.. then dont worrie about it.

unless you doing things with (or have made changes to) Apcache, TomCat, rsync, ssh, sudo, your FireWall, scp, rsh, etc... then you dont need any other files. ... at least that I can think of.

-evildead
 
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