very interesting problem with an iBook...

[Pierre.Suave]

Earlier today I was helping a friend with their iBook G3, we were syncing their iPod touch, and diagnosing a CD Burning problem. After that was done and fixed or sorted out, I ran Onyx the maintenance utility. After a reboot, OSX asked for a username and password, which it had never done before. The password and username that were previously in use also did not work. Not to worry I said, we will just use the password reset utility on the OSX Tiger disc and reset it.

Well, I did that and what it did was create a NEW userfolder and home folder, which also means all the old folders are still there, but inaccessible.

When I open system preferences>accounts and attempt to see what accounts are available, it never opens, instead it hangs on the system preference screen. Before, when it would open the accounts screen, it was just a gray box with nothing there that should be there.



his old user folder is still there, and I presume if I can get that user back, then the computer will be back to normal.

My question is, how can I do that without either the system preference accounts panel working, or the disc itself not being able to find any user accounts to modify?

[Pierre.Suave]

1. This is what the accounts window looks like now...

That is not what it is supposed to look like.

[alfredo]

2. If you don't get any responses here, try

http://www.macnn.com/ They have some good forums. There's always the Apple forums.

I googled "password won't work in Tiger" to see if there was some hits. You might find some clues there.

[Pierre.Suave]

5. Been there, done that...

Thread is not getting a lot of responses.

[alfredo]

7. Too bad. Keep trying.

[Omphaloskepsis]

3. If you run...

powells-computer:~ powell$ sudo ls /Users
.localized      Shared          powell
powells-computer:~ powell$ 

From the terminal does it show the old user account? I was
already root, you should be prompted for a password.

[Pierre.Suave]

4. this may be a stoopid question, but...

do I replace the "powells-computer" with the name of the previous user account on this computer?

[alfredo]

6. Would MuCommander show the files?

http://www.mucommander.com/