Screwed my mac
I Screwed my Mac. I use a PowerMac iMac G5.
Am not sure what exactly I did on Friday evening to result in my system to lose all its default settings.
Cannot login to Mail Application as the configurations are all lost. So too for the Chat application. Cannot access the Documents, Desktop nor any other folders coz I dont have the sufficient permissions.
All I did on Friday was change the UID for the user and the home folder to /var/root. Id changed these values from the command prompt using the command - dscl (Directory Service command line utility). Now this might explain why I couldn't access any of the folders.
But what I could not comprehend is after Id reverted the changes made to UID and the home folder , I still could not access any of the folders. Id had to change the ownership of the folders explicitly.
Another strange behavior Id noticed is that after modifying the folder permissions, when Id accessed the folders I couldnt see any of the older files Id saved in the folders. But could see the files from the Terminal.
I searched for the some of the files using spotlight, and when i clicked on the folders retrieved from spotlight they turned up on my Desktop. So now I have - only a couple of folders visible on my desktop, whereas the rest remain "hidden". Note that none of these file name s start with a . .
Ofcourse any good Unix User would look em all up from the terminal.
Anyway It serves my initial purpose of hiding some of my files.
Id want totry it again but for admins in my company. They had a hard time and mighty pissed off that too on a Monday morn.
Will try it sometime.
And another update to add is that when I try to quit the applications, first my Finder crashed and then the Crash Reporter crashed follwoed by the Mail Application. Had to just restart my system.
