Account Rebuilding Question

Hello! I'm a new Mac technician and have been working at an Apple Authorized Repair Center for less than 3 months; just got my ACMT and ACTC certs as well.

This is my first post here as I don't really know where else to ask. The guys I work with aren't all that helpful and take the "difficult" work from me without bothering to give me a clue as to what they are doing to fix the machine.

Anyway.... There was an issue that stumped me the other day and I really want to know how to fix it:

A customer brought in a Power Mac G4 running 10.4.11. They mentioned that they had bought the computer from someone else and, after buying it, changed the short name on the admin account so that it has their name. I told them the short name should never be changed, but what's done is done...

They brought it to us because they forgot the admin password and wanted me to reset it. I used a Tiger installation disc to do the admin password reset (and no, I didn't reset the root account.) After the reset, I rebooted the computer and the admin account was gone from the log-in screen. It automatically logged in to their daughter's managed account. I went into System Preferences to the User section and the Sys Pref sceen acted strangely. It said "Loading Accounts..." at the top of the window. When I clicked again, it went blank. In the Finder window I checked to make sure the admin and managed account home folders were at least still on the system and they were. This is only the beginning of the troubles...

After calling the customer to explain what happened, she wanted me to add another admin account to the computer. Since I couldn't add it using System Preferences, I asked my manager what to do. He said to do an archive & install with the Tiger disc. After doing that, no accounts would log-in to the computer. We got a log-in screen asking to type in a user name and password. He did a few things to it while I was at lunch and managed to create a new admin account, but the problem is that it isn't linked to both of the old accounts (other admin and managed) that are still on the system. Only the newly created admin account can be logged into now. He mentioned something about having to rebuild the accounts and gave it to the other guy to work on.

What happened here? And what exactly does "rebuilding the accounts" entail?

Thanks for your help!

J

 

Like I said, I am new at this. I assumed the way I was fixing it (actually it was my manager's way and I was duplicating his advice) was wrong. Everything he told me to do seemed to make it worse.

Thanks for your answer. You are a lot more helpful than others I know...