Messed up acoounts on MBP while trying to change home folder name!

[dexterotown]

I received my MBP with a brand new hard drive after it proved faulty. When I opened it up, I noticed that the name of the home folder had been changed to "Administrator" instead of my old short name. I followed the directions on the apple support page <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428> titled "Mac OS X: How to change user short name or home directory name". When I reached what I thought was step 6, I wasn't able to change the name to something that already existed; it didn't allow me to confirm the change. I cancelled the operation and logged back out of the root user account...I disabled the root user account and logged back into my normal account. When I did this, all of my preferences had been restored back to the mac default settings and all of my files had been reformatted into a more basic way....

I'm not sure exactly what happened here, but my regular account that was supposed to be the administrator account is completely unformatted and doesn't appear to be mine at all.

I've read a lot about fiddling with the root user account and how it is dangerous with regards to permissions and the administrator account, and I'm feeling pretty unnerved about what happened to my computer.

Please help! I don't want to take my computer back into the store where I just had my hard drive fixed, and I don't want to fiddle with these settings any more!

 

[benthewraith]

I received my MBP with a brand new hard drive after it proved faulty. When I opened it up, I noticed that the name of the home folder had been changed to "Administrator" instead of my old short name. I followed the directions on the apple support page <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428> titled "Mac OS X: How to change user short name or home directory name". When I reached what I thought was step 6, I wasn't able to change the name to something that already existed; it didn't allow me to confirm the change. I cancelled the operation and logged back out of the root user account...I disabled the root user account and logged back into my normal account. When I did this, all of my preferences had been restored back to the mac default settings and all of my files had been reformatted into a more basic way....

I'm not sure exactly what happened here, but my regular account that was supposed to be the administrator account is completely unformatted and doesn't appear to be mine at all.

I've read a lot about fiddling with the root user account and how it is dangerous with regards to permissions and the administrator account, and I'm feeling pretty unnerved about what happened to my computer.

Please help! I don't want to take my computer back into the store where I just had my hard drive fixed, and I don't want to fiddle with these settings any more!

Do you still have the files? Create a new admin account and copy the files over to the new admin account. Then delete the old corrupted account.

 

[dexterotown]

Do you still have the files? Create a new admin account and copy the files over to the new admin account. Then delete the old corrupted account.

yes the files still seem to be present under a different folder in the users folder, but I can't seem to log into THAT user....
are you sure this would work? I have some conflicting opinions
<https://discussions.apple.com/message/15382772#15382772>

 

[benthewraith]

yes the files still seem to be present under a different folder in the users folder, but I can't seem to log into THAT user....
are you sure this would work? I have some conflicting opinions
<https://discussions.apple.com/message/15382772#15382772>

I don't see why changing the name of your home folder (which is specific to the user account) would require a reinstall of OS X. However, unless you're able to access that account, I'm not sure whether you would be able to backup your files. Do you have a master password set for the computer? If not, in the new admin account you could set a master password up and see if it could give you access to the files.