Although OS X / Darwin / Unix appears to perform access control using your name, in fact a number underlies every name on the system. The first user typically owns 501, the next 502, etc. What the user name for 501 is is different on different machines. When you move a file hierarchy from one machine to another in the manner you did, it contains the numbers, not the "persons." This often gives rise to bizarre "it says I have access but I don't" moments.
Rather than invest a lot of brainpower in developing walking chowns to fix this problem, my approach has always been to make sure the same user has the same number on both machines involved. Using File Migration in the initial startup of the machine finesses this problem. Or, I start the machine in Target mode right after finishing the installation and move the user's file hierarchy onto the drive before defining the first user. If I can't do either of those, I move the user's hierarchy, restart in single user mode, destroy the existing admin user I used to do the setup (who probably owns 501), then restart the machine. It will go into its first-user dance, at which point you carefully register yourself identically as before, and it will find and adopt your home folder. I use http://www.numlock.ch/news/it/how-to-reset-a-mac-os-x-installation/ as the revirginizing guide. On Nov 17, 2012, at 12:36 PM, Neil Laubenthal wrote: > Hello again; another question for the group. > > I recently had to rebuild my MBP Retina from scratch due to an SSD failure > that was replaced under Applecare. After installing the OS and reinstalling > apps from both the App Store and .dmg files I copied my old home directory > back then recreated my account with the same name; telling System Preferences > to use the existing folder. > > Since then I've had a bunch of strange things happen. > > 1. My login.keychain got duplicated about 50,000 times in the > ~/Library/Keychains folder, about once a minute a copy got created with an > extension of .sb-aaaaaa-bbbbbb where aaaaaa and bbbbbb are both 6 digit hex > numbers. I repaired the keychain (no issues) and deleted all of the extra > ones including fixing permissions on > ~/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.syncedpreferences.plist as I found on a > couple of Apple tech bulletins. > > 2. I'm getting a lot of console messages complaining about not having > permissions to write the file referenced above in #1 despite the fact that my > user account (a non admin account) has R/W permissions. > > 3. Lots of console messages that say *** Failed to decode 7bit0 data, > treating as binary. > > I'm starting to wonder whether I should have just recreated my account from > scratch and not copied my home directory over; but then I would have to > redownload 3 GB of mail from my various IMAP servers as well as all of my iOS > applications so I was hoping not to do that. > > Has anybody had any issues restoring a home directory this way and recreating > the account using the existing folder? Alternatively; any suggestions as to > how to best fix this without starting completely from scratch or is it better > to just bite the bullet and redownload everything? > > I'm starting to lean towards starting over as I've had to rebuild the OS 4 > times the past two months and while some of them may have been due to the > failing SSD there might be something corrupted in the home directory. > > Ideas or suggestions anyone? > > Thanks. > > ----------------------------------------------- > There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking > stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello. > > neil > > > > _______________________________________________ > MacOSX-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk -- Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas. http://macsrwe.com _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
