Hi,
Big problems, which could be my own fault...
Last weekend I moved into a new place where I am renting a room and sharing a secure wifi but with some sort of Windows network attached to it (a shared folder appears in my hard drives list). Concerned about my computer's security, I decided to do a "get info" and change my hd to "no access" for everyone and keep "read & write" for my other Mac accounts. And yup, that was a bad move...
Upon plugging in my iPhone and external USB drive, as you can guess, OS X did not respond to them. So, I decided to run the disk utility and repair permissions. But although the estimated time was 21 minutes, it ran for most of the day - about 7 hours. So I then decided to stop it and restarted repair permissions and got an estimated 17 hours. At this point I should have left well enough alone but did not...
Thinking that perhaps there was some sort of data log jam or something, I decided to reboot (lol go ahead and point and laugh if haven't yet cuz yeah...). As you may imagine the computer will no longer boot. I get into about 3 secs from power up and I get the freeze screen of death, instructing me to restarted my computer.
But there is hope...
I do a full system clone each night (with exception to the past week during moving), so I do have a full backup on my USB drive. That said, I can't get my iMac to boot from it either. I end up with the same death screen.
I do have the Mac startup disk but it's in storage at the moment. I know normally in this type of situation one would use the startup dissk to do a repair, but can I get around that somehow?
Finally, by changing my disk permissions as I (should not) have, have I done irreversible damage or can I go back to before? I ask because when the computer was still running I was no no longer able to get the system to unlock when clicking on the padlock icon when doing a get info. :-/ I also forgot to mention that indeed, I did choose to "apply to enclosed items" when I changed permissions.
I feel very embarrassed by this mess-up as I've been a web designer for several years and am always so careful about my computer :-(
Thank you in advance for your help.
BB
Big problems, which could be my own fault...
Last weekend I moved into a new place where I am renting a room and sharing a secure wifi but with some sort of Windows network attached to it (a shared folder appears in my hard drives list). Concerned about my computer's security, I decided to do a "get info" and change my hd to "no access" for everyone and keep "read & write" for my other Mac accounts. And yup, that was a bad move...
Upon plugging in my iPhone and external USB drive, as you can guess, OS X did not respond to them. So, I decided to run the disk utility and repair permissions. But although the estimated time was 21 minutes, it ran for most of the day - about 7 hours. So I then decided to stop it and restarted repair permissions and got an estimated 17 hours. At this point I should have left well enough alone but did not...
Thinking that perhaps there was some sort of data log jam or something, I decided to reboot (lol go ahead and point and laugh if haven't yet cuz yeah...). As you may imagine the computer will no longer boot. I get into about 3 secs from power up and I get the freeze screen of death, instructing me to restarted my computer.
But there is hope...
I do a full system clone each night (with exception to the past week during moving), so I do have a full backup on my USB drive. That said, I can't get my iMac to boot from it either. I end up with the same death screen.
I do have the Mac startup disk but it's in storage at the moment. I know normally in this type of situation one would use the startup dissk to do a repair, but can I get around that somehow?
Finally, by changing my disk permissions as I (should not) have, have I done irreversible damage or can I go back to before? I ask because when the computer was still running I was no no longer able to get the system to unlock when clicking on the padlock icon when doing a get info. :-/ I also forgot to mention that indeed, I did choose to "apply to enclosed items" when I changed permissions.
I feel very embarrassed by this mess-up as I've been a web designer for several years and am always so careful about my computer :-(
Thank you in advance for your help.
BB
