Tiger permissions issue

[coloradodoug]

Have a friend with a G5 running Tiger 10.4.11. Recently he installed an hp printer update for his hp printer. Since then the system has been hosed. It appears to me as if it is permissions. Finder comes up with nothing populating the left side of the panel such as attached drives and directories...the apps/util folder is empty, i can't access console as it doesn't seem to exist anymore. I installed Cocktail and selected the pilot tab. Mac office products now work again. Another attempt at running Cocktail has been pointless as it just hangs with no indication of doing anything. We have tried installing applejack but with no luck...suspect permissions issues again.

So anyone seen this? Any way to install applejack from Single user on a systems with permission problems?

I did attempt to boot off the install disk but the user can;t find the disk and my versions are a mismatch so no joy.

 

[Hal Itosis]

Tiger 10.4.11

The preferred way to repair permissions is simply via Disk Utility while booted normally. [i.e., booting from the HD (as usual) is inherently better than booting from the system dvd, for permissions repair.] All that Cocktail, OnyX, etc., do is execute a shell command that could be easily done in Terminal:

diskutil repairPermissions /

[sudo not needed]

AppleJack is handy when the user can't login or if Disk Utility is somehow inaccessible.

--

From the sound of things however, there may (also?) be some perms messed up inside the user's home. If that is the case, then *none* of the above will fix (that part of) the problem. [not until Leopard did Apple provide a utility (on the dvd) for fixing up perms inside user homes.]

If there is a "perms" issue inside a user's home, and if that issue is one of ownership... then this command is one way to tackle that particular aspect:

sudo chown -R -v $(id -u) ~

A password will be requested, but not echoed to the screen when typed.

[that version is a bit simplistic as sometimes there are items in a user's home which should be owned by root... but those should show up later when some utility (usually a backup app) asks the user to reauthorize via password.]

 

[coloradodoug]

thanks

Thanks a ton for the chmod tip. I had thought about it but didn;t have the nerver to make use of it. I'll follow-up on the results.