I'm in big trouble and currently operating with a semi-functional system out of my second admin account…
Previous History:
I'm on a MacPro and I have my main user account on another volume than my system. This has worked just beautifully for me over the past years, sometimes there are drawbacks and it's kind of more failure-prone in some cases. This 'some cases' now happened again: there was a blackout and after that I couldn't login to my user account on the non-system volume anymore. I've been there once and hadn't any problems fixing it somehow, but now I screwed up big time.
I tried… - repairing permissions and resetting the ACL - started Snow Leopard 911 (Backup Installation on a external USB drive) and rebuild my two main volumes via DiscWarrior
This didn't lead to anything, but after a long night I simply tried to rename the user account to "Patte-old" in System Preferences » Accounts via Ctrl-Click "Patte" [my main user account].
I also set to path to "patte-old". The next thing was to create a new user which I named after the old one: "patte" and this time specified the home directory on "[I]/Users/patte[/I]". This is a symlink to the real location on the other disk "/Volumes/Lagerhalle/patte".
It worked instantly, …
but of course the permissions were messed up… I tried repairing them and I guess this is where I messed things up…
All I remember is that I booted again into Snow Leopard 911 from my external USB drive and used the "Reset Password" » reset ACL there instead the one on my Snow Leopard Boot Disc Image. I repaired permissions and checked the folders with DiscWarrior again… So, to make a long story short:
The important part - my problem (»» skip everything above if you lazy/don't need details««)
Currently I'm stuck with this…
I can unlock the little lock in the bottom right of the "Get Info" dialog, but I can't make changes to my harddrives anymore. They instantly revert to "custom". I've also tried BatchMod and a little bit of terminal magic (which I'm not too familiar with) to reset the permissions, but… I wasn't allowed to chage them, even not via "sudo chmod".
Please help me out on this one, I'm capable of firing up all the maintenance tools and typing in all sorts of commands (that you give me) into terminal. The thing is, I guess I'll have to to a clean install to get rid of some other errors, but even then I would have no access to all my data on the other drives.
Thanks for reading through!
