How do I create root user on os Lion server? I somehow deleted mine

Question

how do I create root user on Mac OSX Lion server. I somehow deleted mine and now my documents, download folders won't work/missing, as well as my systems preferences won't open, it just crashes

Answer 1

OS X, while does have a root user, doesn't have it active. Did you remove administrative privileges from your user account? None of your documents or downloads are owned by root, and deleting the root user wouldn't affect them at all (you would have trouble booting, I think). It sounds like you accidentally tried to delete your root folder (rm -rf /), which started to trash your user account but left the rest of the system alone.

I would advise trying to create a new user account from Terminal (See here for instructions on how to do that), and then see if everything is working fine from there. If they are, then you might want to start looking into some HFS+ file recovery software-- those documents/downloads that are missing, were probably deleted.

Once you're done recovering files, you'll probably want to easily access the old files under the old useraccount. Run sudo chmod -R o+r /Users/oldusername where oldusername is the shortname of the old user account. You can ls -l /Users if you don't remember. This will allow all users on the system, including the new user account, to read the old users's files. Copy out what you want to save, and then delete the old user account.