Help! Permissions problems with Leopard!

[ThatWasAwkward]

Basically, when I installed Leopard it corrupted all of my privileges. On pretty much everything a user named "_unknown" had Read & Write privileges and my user name did not show up at all.

So... I tried to fix it myself. I opened the Get Info screen for my main OS X partition and removed the "_unknown" and added Read & Write permissions for my user name, and then checked off "Apply to enclosed items" so it would apply to everything on the disk. It was taking a while so I went and got an overdue oil change for my car.

When I came back it was done, but the computer was running kind of sluggishly. I opened the dashboard and looked at iStat Pro to see what applications were running, and there were quite a few that I didn't recognize the names of. I didn't write down what any of them were. They were all taking up a very tiny amount of system resources each. I decided to reboot to see if that would help.

...And now I can't start OS X. It gets to the grey Apple logo and the spinning circle underneath it and just sits there. I can boot into the Windows partition (how I'm posting this now), but I can't get into OS X at all.

Please help me out. What can I do?

 

[WildCowboy]

Can you boot from your OS X install disc, launch Disk Utility, and then repair permissions on your internal OS X installation from there?

 

[Sun Baked]

Can you boot from your OS X install disc, launch Disk Utility, and then repair permissions on your internal OS X installation from there?

That reads the wrong/outdate permissions ... so it usually is a better idea to run Disk Utility off the HD.

Doing an apply all to the entire HD for permissions really messes things up, might be better to do an archive and install -- and do not preserve the User/network setting.

Might even have to reinstall some of the apps, and maybe as a last resort create a new user.

 

[WildCowboy]

That reads the wrong/outdate permissions ... so it usually is a better idea to run Disk Utility off the HD.

Agreed, but if the system won't boot, that's not an option. If you can get as far as booting using the outdated permissions, you can then fix them for good while booted from the hard drive.

But yes, Archive and Install is another option.

 

[ThatWasAwkward]

Archive and Install, huh? I just read up on it a tiny bit after reading your suggestions, and it seems like it might be my best option. Thanks.