Admin Login Gone, Guest Acct Only...

Question

I did a healthy search on my little problem here and mine appears to be a little different from the rest.
I have my MacBook pro (Running the latest ver. of Tiger) set so that i need to authenticate my login and pass every time I open up the laptop or I deactivate the screensaver.
Today, I opened'er up and for some reason my login and password didn't work. I thought that was weird and I rebooted (Ctrl-Opt-Power Button). Low and behold my Admin Login was gone! I only have access to this Guest Account that I created a while back.
So, I login to the Guest Account and check out the Accounts Panel in System Preferences and nothing comes up. I click the button and the window hangs ("Loading Accounts" appears at the top, but nothing happens). I click 'Show All' to return to all the icons and then click Accounts and the window renders, but it's completely blank.
*I did a lot of searching and I found the single-user-mode-using-NetInfo-Manager solution* and that didn't do anything. After I do the +"nicl -raw..."+ command, nothing seems to happen. While I was in Single User Mode, in the shell, I checked out my Users folder and my Account is still there.
So, bottom line, I only have access to an unprivileged Guest Account and OS X can't seem to boot so I can see my Admin Account. I would much rather not reinstall OS X since I have a lot of graphic design, music and a lot of my photography work in that account.
Message was edited by: Name Withheld

Answer 1

Name Withheld wrote:
So what are we looking for with these "nicl" commands? I take it that the above is probably bad news somehow.
nicl is the "NetInfo Command Line" interface. I wanted to see why you were getting the "ni_listprops: No such directory" message, and it is telling me that although the /users part of the NetInfo hierarchy exists, it seems to have lost the entries for your two real users.
We could put them back, tediously, using nicl, but who knows what other "users" are missing. So your best bet is to restore the NetInfo Database. Funnily enough I just posted how to do this for another user. You might want to read Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server: How to Replace the NetInfo Database to help understand the instructions that follow (this is a more-or-less standard post I keep for this situation). Note you've already got your list of UIDs versus Users: 501 is Ghostmeat, and 502 is Guest.
Your NetInfo database is corrupt. so we will need to give you a new one. This involves re-creating the user accounts, and the order in which they are created matters. I recommend you print this out in a largish mono-spaced font so you don't miss any spaces (or add extra ones). Note that case is important.
Start up in Single User Mode and type carefully, with a return at the end of each line:/sbin/fsck -y
Repeat the above until it says your disk is OK. Then:
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /var/db/netinfo
mv local.nidb/ local.nidb.bad
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
ls -ln /UsersThis last command will give you one line for each user, plus one for the "Shared" directory, which doesn't interest us. Each user will have a line like one of these:
<pre>drwxr-xr-x 29 501 501 986 Jan 17 18:38 michaelc
drwxr-xr-x 14 520 20 476 Sep 10 2004 jdoe</pre>The second numeric field (501, 520) is the user ID (UID) and you need to list the uids against the shortname s given in the final column. Make sure you get the name right for UID 501! Then continue with
rebootWhen you restart, you should get the Setup Assistant, just as if it was a new machine. You will be prompted for all of your user information. Be careful to use the same short name as previously for user 501.
If there are any further users, these can be added, in the order of their UIDs, i.e. 502, 503 …, using System Preferences > Accounts. Again, be careful to use the same shortname. If there are any gaps in the UID sequence 501, 502, … you will need to create dummy users to fill them. These can later be deleted.
Post back if you need further help, and to let us know how you get on!