Locked out of user account

[DannyBM]

(I originally posted this on mac-forums.com – http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...1700-locked-out-user-account.html#post1302274 – but haven't been able to resolve the issue.. any help would be hugely helpful here. Thanks
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Hi, guys,

Earlier today I had somewhat of a brain explosion. Yes, I deleted my "private" folder in the hope of freeing up some of the 20GB it was taking up. Silly, I know. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. And besides – 20GB!

So. After some forum-prowling I discovered the best and essentially the only course of action considering my mac wouldn't get past the grey logo-screen was to re-install OSX via DVD, which I've done and now I'm back up and running.. with one small problem.

I can't access my old and cherished user account. This is going to have most of you tut-tutting, but I've never been a Time Machine user and as such it would seem I can't use migration assistant to hook back into my old user profile. However, all my stuff is still there – the movies, documents, everything. But my old user folder is not being recognised as such; instead, it's just a regular folder (which means it's not picked up in the "Users" pane of system preferences) and all the sub-folders are locked.

All my stuff is there – there is the exact same amount of space on my hard disk as there was before this fiasco. All my applications are still installed and functional from what I can tell.

Can anyone tell me how can I get my precious user profile (not to mention all my documents) back?

Many thanks in advance.

 

[jameslmoser]

If your /private directory was over 20GB, something was there that could be removed... probably logs. in /private/var/logs, but I guess its too late to look now. =)

Did you recreate the same username in your new Install? If so I am betting that the user id is different than the one you had, so to the system it thinks that where your directory should be, there is already a directory owned by someone else. For example, in the Terminal app, if I do this:

james@silverbox ~ $ cd /Users/
james@silverbox /Users $ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt 14 root wheel 476 Aug 2 17:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x@ 65 james staff 2210 Sep 23 18:30 james

See how my home directory is owned by "james" and in the "staff" group?
What do you see when you do this?

I see from the other thread you think you old username had spaces in it. It didn't, even though Mac OS X probably made it look like you did. Your old username didn't have spaces, that was your account's name field, but not the actual username. Unix doesn't allow spaces in the username, and mac os x is unix.

If you can run those commands I showed you above I might be able to help you get it sorted out.