Creating a new Administrator -Help-

[John Doe 57]

OK so my Safari doesn't work anymore under my current account. I am the administrator of my MacBook Pro running 10.5.2. A few days ago I made a new account called "Safari Test" so I could see if Safari worked under a new account. It did. So here is what I want to do:
1. Create a new account
2. Make the new account the Administrator account
3. Move all of my files and data into this new account
4. Delete the old account

Can this be done?

 

[Dimwhit]

Steps 1, 2 and 4 can be done easily. Step 3 is a little more involved. The way I would do it would be to move all the files to an external drive, then back into the new account. Wait a while before deleting the old account, though, just in case. Aside from the obvious (documents, pictures, music, etc.), you want to move over the library folder. But don't copy the whole folder back to the new account. Just move over the specific things you need, like the Mail folder, some prefs...things like that. You could probably move over the entire /Library/Application Support folder, too.

But yes, it's doable. Keep in mind, though, that you may end up copying over whatever it was that was screwing up Safari. That's why you don't want to copy the whole Library folder to the new account.

 

[John Doe 57]

Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a try.

 

[John Doe 57]

This is tricky. I put a whole bunch of folders in the shared folder and moved them over to the new account from there, but it gets annoying when it keeps asking for the administrator password. If I'm going to move things to an external HD, I'm going to need 150GB! Blast, I only have 56GB free on my external HD!

 

[Dimwhit]

This is tricky. I put a whole bunch of folders in the shared folder and moved them over to the new account from there, but it gets annoying when it keeps asking for the administrator password. If I'm going to move things to an external HD, I'm going to need 150GB! Blast, I only have 56GB free on my external HD!

Yep, that's why an external drive works better. You don't have to worry about permissions.