Unable to access user accounts after acting like a complete and utter moron...

[NickFalk]

After spending most of the days making a dmg. of my system disc, moving it to an external HD, re-partition the internal discs reinstalling the system dmg and deleting the copy from the external HD I'm now in BIG doo-doo.

I think the problem stems from my not to brilliant idea to delete two shortcuts/aliases from the system-root, namely the alias "etc" and "tmp". I had never seen these before, as I believe they are hidden for normal users (but they probably became visible due to my escapades earlier today).

Anyway I am now 100% unable to access any of the 4 different accounts on my computer. I actually had to create a completely new account to access OSX at all. Oddly I can see that the accounts are intact through the finder but they just don't appear in the login window. It is not possible to login to these accounts using the "name and password"-window either.

Even more strange: it seems that there is a second login-window hidde behind the current one (with the new user) unfortunately there is no way to access this, unless any of you real wizards are able to help with this HUGE HUGE HUGE problem.

Any help would be highly appreciated as I am dreading the though of having to move all files from the different accounts manually to another HD, deleting the original accounts and creating new user-accounts and move the files back to these. This seems to be the only solution but I fear I'm gonna end up with loads of permition-problems going down this route...

Well its nearly 01:30 AM here so I'm off to cry myself to bed in a few minutes, hopefully the morning brings some good news. Cheers...

 

[Oryan]

Hopefully this page can help you out. link

 

[Doctor Q]

Can you get into the Terminal application?

If so, type the following two commands, entering your administrator's password when prompted:

sudo ln -s private/etc /etc
sudo ln -s private/tmp /tmp

In general, it is very dangerous to use the sudo command (and to mess with files in the disk root directory) unless you are pretty sure what you are doing. In this case, I believe these commands will restore those missing aliases.

 

[OSSfan]

Can you get into the Terminal application?

If so, type the following two commands, entering your administrator's password when prompted:

sudo ln -s private/etc /etc
sudo ln -s private/tmp /tmp

In general, it is very dangerous to use the sudo command (and to mess with files in the disk root directory) unless you are pretty sure what you are doing. In this case, I believe these commands will restore those missing aliases.

I think you need to be in root to do those 2 commands to recreate the links. Otherwise you'll just be creating them from your home directory and they won't do you any good. So before running those 2, do a:

cd /

 

[26139]

Or you could just..

You COULD just copy the files to the external and start over...that WOULD work.

It's a little late to tell you this, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, don't erase any files if you don't know what they do. They DON'T take up much space anyway.

 

[Doctor Q]

I think you need to be in root to do those 2 commands to recreate the links. Otherwise you'll just be creating them from your home directory and they won't do you any good. So before running those 2, do a:

cd /

I think they are correct as stated. Soft links are merely string references stored at a given location in the filesystem, so ln -s private/tmp /tmp means to create a soft link from /tmp that holds the string "private/tmp". When a process tries to open /tmp, it will be redirected to the path "private/tmp" relative to the starting place (/tmp), not relative to where you are when you did the "ln" command.

What matters, of course, is whether this fixes the system.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

sudo ln -s /private/tmp /tmp

should work no matter where you stand...

 

[NickFalk]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. I ended up having to bite the bullet and install OSX from scratch and move the old user-accounts manually. Ah, well at least I now have a fresh Tiger-install.

Oh, and I think I have learned my lesson. I won't be going into the system folders at all from now on....