Want to know how to shut down a Mac running Leopard in seconds?
I accidentally shut down my Mac running Leopard on Thursday evening by doing the following TWO MOUSE CLICKS
1. right clicked on "Macintosh HD" - my boot drive (I have several drives including a suddenly dead 1 TB rocstor "time machine"drive...perfect timing)
2. left clicked on the line under "Sharing and Permissions" and holding the mouse down on the Everyone line from "read only" to "no access"...I didn't want all those people in the little icon to have access to my hard drive. Seemed logical to me.
(to be fair, yes, I had to unlock the little lock in the lower corner of the screen....but I have to do that to change my user picture too, so that seemed normal)
Turns out that doing that is essentially locking your computer's file system out of itself. I had done this in the evening and gone to bed early with a high fever. When I got out of bed the next day, I went over to check mail and noticed the machine was stuck in screen saver mode. I had to force a reboot. Well, the reboot never happened...just the white apple screen and the spinning disk below it.... forever. So I tried the old "multiple reboot" routine. Perhaps there had been some sort of new upgrade that was being installed, I just didn't know.
I was stuck, but having had problems like this in the past (which turned out to be a coolant leak, a HW failure) and having an iMac that's logic board had just failed, I assumed it was a hardware failure. I pulled out the Leopard disk to boot from, tried that, and ran disk utility. The disk passed and seemed fine, except, I could not "fix permissions" that was greyed out. Hmmm...that was odd.
At this point I had not made the connection to the permissions change I had made, it seemed innocuous at the time, and there was no warning whatsoever when the OS let me change the permissions that I was about to bring down the entire OS. Bizarre bug in this OS.
Anyhow I decided to try an Archive and Install. Well, this failed as soon as it tried to write on the drive, I assume. At any rate, it failed. Puzzled, and sick, and having now begun to panic I wondered what I may have done to cause this when it occurred to me that I may have screwed something up with my permissions change. Here's where I pulled the ultimate bonehead move: I decided to test my hypothesis. But not the smart way by googling this, but by trying it out on my MacBook Pro. Well, it worked! I hosed up that machine too. Now, knowing the problem I went to a third machine and began searching for answers.
Turns out that many have walked into this quicksand and become stuck with machines that won't reboot, and their own nightmares. One of many pages recommended launching the terminal utility from the disk and hard-coding the permissions back onto the drive through the old UNIX command CHMOD. Well, that worked for my laptop, which I'd not begun an "Archive and Install" on, but it did not work on my PowerMAC G5. On the laptop, the outcome of this was that I was able to re-run "fix permissions" using disk utility and after about 1 hour I could use that machine again.
However, I still had to get my main machine working. I poked around for another hour or so on message boards and learned that somebody else had to recursively change all the permissions (basically the -R option). Well, I tried this in single user mode, and it did not work (a few boards said that worked better than running Terminal utility...it is not). Well, back in terminal mode from the install DVD, and it worked. It took hours to do that. At one point I looked up and lots of error messages from attempts to change permissions on my other/external drives...agghh!! I stopped it and began again.
At last that finished. "Verify/Fix permissions" was no longer greyed out. I did that, then continued with the re-install of the OS. But apparently, the installation routine forgot I had checked the "preserve network/user settings" so I had to trick the OS into thinking my new user name (with a different shortname) was unique, and assigned the short name from my old username.
Well, this basically got me to where I am now: re-installing iTunes, iPhoto and getting them to work. Waiting until Monday so I can call Adobe and inform them that i'm not trying to steal their software, but re-install the same software I paid them for on the same machine, etc. I probably have not found all the little things I still need to fix yet.
This was all caused by inadvertantely changing on setting in about 5 seconds time right from the desktop with the mouse. This is a HUGE bug in the OS. there is no warning at all. The entire name/icon is misleading. I don't know why you would ever want to be able to do this (you don't even have to logon as ROOT to do it!).
















