Up front, I will confess I broke many of my own rules for doing this kind of thing, and what I tried to do was probably Dumb. Live and learn.
So, I was upgrading an old MacBook Air to Big Sur and I just assumed everything would work, since I have had such good success with these types of projects in the past. Normally I would never do this on a machine (wait for it) without a backup, but this machine didn’t seem to have much on it of real value, so worst case I clean install and all is good.
As it turns out, there is one thing of moderate value that it would be nice not to lose. I have resigned myself to losing it, but thought I would post and see if anyone has any suggestions for things I have not thought of.
Basically, during the final reboot of the upgrade, the machine hangs. I can boot to safe mode and operate out of there (with limited functionality) but I had to create a new non-admin user account to do it.
I can boot to single user no problem. If I proceed to try and get to a normal boot from single user mode it pretty much hangs right away, and this kind of matches the general timing of it hanging when booting normally. So it seems whatever happens right after the single-user mode part of the boot process is where the problem lies.
Is it worth trying to mess around with things in the normal boot process to try and get it to succeed? If so, what should I try, and are there any resources for doing this?
I have reset the NVRAM and checked the disk for errors.
My real problem is I need to copy some files that I do not have permission to copy.
When I try and access the files (from my newly created account in safe mode), it rejects the username and password that worked to login to the computer pre-upgrade. The username in the Users directory is different than what I used to login to the machine normally. I never used the username in the Users directory, always another username. I think that it is possible that looooong ago Apple used to ask to name the machine and and created the Users directory name based on that. Then you would setup a “username” and somehow it managed the complexity of this. And I should add that this user account has been migrated at least once before, and was originally setup on a… Powerbook.
So, I just need to access one file. I tried imaging the whole disk, but it only imaged the data that was not owned by the account in question that owns the file I need access to. When I try copy/paste it asks me for Administrator credentials before starting the operation.
I am reasonably comfortable with command line stuff, the reason I migrated to Mac was because they had adopted BSD as their core.
Anyways, appreciate any tips or pointers, and even abuse. Writing this has been at least therapeutic.
Thanks ~
So, I was upgrading an old MacBook Air to Big Sur and I just assumed everything would work, since I have had such good success with these types of projects in the past. Normally I would never do this on a machine (wait for it) without a backup, but this machine didn’t seem to have much on it of real value, so worst case I clean install and all is good.
As it turns out, there is one thing of moderate value that it would be nice not to lose. I have resigned myself to losing it, but thought I would post and see if anyone has any suggestions for things I have not thought of.
Basically, during the final reboot of the upgrade, the machine hangs. I can boot to safe mode and operate out of there (with limited functionality) but I had to create a new non-admin user account to do it.
I can boot to single user no problem. If I proceed to try and get to a normal boot from single user mode it pretty much hangs right away, and this kind of matches the general timing of it hanging when booting normally. So it seems whatever happens right after the single-user mode part of the boot process is where the problem lies.
Is it worth trying to mess around with things in the normal boot process to try and get it to succeed? If so, what should I try, and are there any resources for doing this?
I have reset the NVRAM and checked the disk for errors.
My real problem is I need to copy some files that I do not have permission to copy.
When I try and access the files (from my newly created account in safe mode), it rejects the username and password that worked to login to the computer pre-upgrade. The username in the Users directory is different than what I used to login to the machine normally. I never used the username in the Users directory, always another username. I think that it is possible that looooong ago Apple used to ask to name the machine and and created the Users directory name based on that. Then you would setup a “username” and somehow it managed the complexity of this. And I should add that this user account has been migrated at least once before, and was originally setup on a… Powerbook.
So, I just need to access one file. I tried imaging the whole disk, but it only imaged the data that was not owned by the account in question that owns the file I need access to. When I try copy/paste it asks me for Administrator credentials before starting the operation.
I am reasonably comfortable with command line stuff, the reason I migrated to Mac was because they had adopted BSD as their core.
Anyways, appreciate any tips or pointers, and even abuse. Writing this has been at least therapeutic.
Thanks ~