Did something completely brain-dead on Saturday that took me the better part of the weekend to fix. Decided to share my story here for posterity and to help anyone out who is having similar problems (hopefully for a better reason than 'they decided to mess with it'...)
I forget why I noticed this but I went into 'get info' on my hard drive and noticed that my user account was only set for 'read' permissions on the root directory of my drive. Now, I've never really had any problems copying files to or from there, but for some reason I decided to change permissions so that I would have both read and write access. Then I had the bright idea to select the 'apply to enclosed items' box on my root directory. Yeah.... so the more intelligent among you probably know what happened next - all of my kexts, which are supposed to have 'root' permissions, were changed to my user account's instead. A series of messages stating something to the effect of '*.kext was installed incorrectly' appeared for every kext in the folder, I'd clear through the messages and they would return within minutes.
At some point I rebooted the computer to access the Windows side of my boot drive, then when I tried to boot back into mac it hung at the spinning wheel of death. Verbose mode revealed that it was hanging just after 'iobluetoothhcicontroller', indicating that it was not loading the graphics drivers which come just after that step (found this out on the tonymac forums).
After doing enough research to figure out that what I did was really dumb, I was in a bit of a bind. I didn't have another mac to run multibeast from and reinstall the kexts, and I couldnt find my original unibeast boot USB stick anywhere. I was able to use iBoot to boot from a snow leopard disk and run terminal from there, but the terminal on the install disc was too limited in its functionality to be much use - no sudo command, not even 'su' was available, so I couldnt authenticate to write anything to the drive.
Eventually I found a program that allowed read/write functionality to HFS+ volumes from Windows that I installed as a free trial. Following the advice of a tonymac forum thread, I moved all of the graphics kexts to another folder and rebooted the machine. It didnt look very good, but I was able to boot into my Mac, back up the entire kext folder, then move all of my kexts to the desktop and reinstall them en masse with kextbeast which restored the system to normal.
Anyway I just thought I would post my ordeal here in case it helps anyone down the line. I do have a couple of questions if anyone is interested in answering them though.
If I had done this same action on an actual Mac (changed all the file permissions in the drive to be owned by the primary user) would the same thing have happened, and if not, why not?
Any way I could have changed the kext permissions or moved them to a different folder from the Terminal prompt on the snow leopard install disc, given that the 'sudo' and 'su' commands were unavailable?
I will endeavor to be less dumb in the future.
submitted by ployez
[link] [comment]
What is missing? Please comment to help! ...[source] For more info try www.iatkos.net
Post a Comment