Steve Gets A Life

im an idiot

i hosed my G5 today. well kinda.

while trying to install way too many fink packages at once, i managed to install users like mysql, pgsql, etc, but at the same time wipe out users like stevem and root from NetInfo. basically i locked myself out of my computer. for some reason, i logged out and had no way back in.

but i got my stuff back:

• booted into single user mode (hold s when booting)
  
• now that you're root, all you have is a read-only filesystem, fix that:# mount -uw /
  
• # cd Users/stevem
  
• # tar zcvf stevem.tgz Desktop Documents Library [whatever else...]
  
• boot off the OSX installation CD (im using 10.3)
  
• dont over-install (i did the first time, it doesnt help), but use the change password utility to set the password of one of the useless accounts currently on your system (i used mysql)
  
• quit out of the installer and reboot off the hard disk. log in as mysql or whatever you chose in the last step
  
• copy stevem.tgz to a remote server. notice that you can't access the rest of the Users/stevem/ directory, so you couldn't have just copied them directly. well maybe if you had chown'd them or something. anyways...
  
• reinstall OSX
  

so, not the ideal solution, but it works and nothing important was lost.

lesson learned: don't go crazy with fink's dselect. I think the biggest problem was that i didnt have the X11 SDK installed (its on the 10.3 devtools CD that was downstairs i found out later), but i did have the X11-User installed, so i was "half installed" which confused fink. because of this, anything that required X11 failed. several attempts to install non-X11 stuff later i ended up hosing NetInfo. all the users that needed to be added to NetInfo for those packages were added, but all the old ones were deleted. hence the difficulty.

and now its time for bed.

Posted by Steve on October 29, 2003 10:13 PM