Fix a screwed up user files move

[studeggle]

I'm new to macs, only been playing with them for about a year and this week was my first go around at building a hackintosh. It all went pretty smooth thanks to the wonderful guides here. But I screwed things up when I went to move where I stored my user files and now I can't seem to get it fixed so hoping someone here can help.

Error " You are unable to log in to the user account "davideggleston" at this time. Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."

Activity before hand. duplicated the user directory from my SSD drive to my HHD drive where I want it to actually reside and then went into users and then advanced users and pointed to the new location. It said it need to restart to complete the process so I let it. While shutting down the box popped up saying it needed my keychain password, but unfortunately I was not able to enter it before system finished shutting down for the restart. Now I get the error every time I try and login.

I have tried countless restarts. Using the installation thumb drive to access disk utility, terminal (couldn't do much here probably due to lack of knowledge on my part), and do a over the top reinstall. None of the above have made any difference.

I have also tried but failed to enter safe mode using shift at various times, but to no avail. I can get the unibeast boot selector but never seem to find the right spot for getting into safe mode.

I would be very appreciative of any help you can provide, and please do keep in mind I'm still a noob on the scale of knowledge so you might have to be a little specific on an explanation. Or feel free to point to an article for further details as I'm perfectly willing to work to get things solved, but I am starting to run out of ideas short of wiping out all data on the SSD and starting over and as I've been at this for the week now I'd rather not go to that extreem if I can avoid it.

 

[studeggle]

For those coming across this later, I fixed the problem and learned along the way so I'll post this information here for folks.

Hold the down arrow key during computer startup to get the boot menu. From there you can enter valuable flags. -x will make it boot into safe mode which can be confirmed by a red "Safe Mode" in the corner of the screen. Unfortunately this problem was not solvable in/by safe mode.

Solution:
Use the down arrow key to get the boot menu and select single user mode.
Mount the drive once it finishes the text boot and you are at the prompt so you can write to the disk. The following command without quotes "mount –uw /" will mount the drive.
Then at the prompt enter without the quotes "rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone"
Then type reboot.
From here you will be back to the Mac setup and be allowed to create a new administrator account.
Finish creating the new administrator account and reboot
Log into your new administrator account.
Go into system preferences and to users.
From here you can edit your old account and reset its user files location.
After you reset the files location you can login to the old account and be back to normal (provided you did as I did and still had the original files so just changed back to them).


Lesson for future use, always have a backup administrator account

 

[hundly]

Just setting up my first Hackintosh and ran into this problem. So is the take home message that the default user file has to be on the main boot drive?

 

[pinkmouse]

I've had success moving the folders within the User folder, but not tried the actual folder itself.

I used the instructions here, but didn't copy across the custom icons, as frankly, I'm not that fussed by them

 

[Dr_Oh]

I prefer to keep the User folder on the SSD. There are plenty of support files associated with your account that you will get a benefit from being on the faster SSD. To save space I will put just my storage folders (Music, Downloads, Movies etc) on my HDD, then I create symbolic links in my home folder for those folders that I moved. That way the OS still sees the folders as being in the default location, but the contents are stored on another drive. This way I get the most benefit I can from having all system files on the SSD while keep the larger files on a tradition HDD.

 

[sammyesparza]

You have no idea how much this post helped me, I foolishly renamed the file drive (same drive that the home folder is in) and I lost access to my account. With your help I was able to create a new user account, rename the drive back to the original name and bam I can get back in. Thanks!!