I'm right now backing up my system drive in advance of a clean reinstall of Lion due to several annoying bugs I'm encountering. I'm all clear on how to proceed as far as getting it installed and all but what I'm worried about is moving over some of these things I'm currently backing up and the possibility of bringing with them the bugs I'm trying to get rid of.
What's the best way to cleanly return to my previous state?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
That would depend on what the "bugs" were.
I guess you're right...
...well, it's been base system-level sort of stuff: windows not displaying properly; weird permission stuff like just moving a file into a folder on my desktop or trashing something requiring administrator password; four or five apps opening on start-up for no reason. That sort of stuff. I'm not concerned about particular apps certainly.
Some or all of that is due to wrong permissions in your home folder.
Repairing the permissions of a home folder in Lion is a complicated procedure. I don’t know of a simpler one that always works.
Back up all data now. Before proceeding, you must be sure you can restore your system to its present state
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.
Drag or copy — do not type — the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:
chmod -R -N ~
The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. When a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) appears below what you entered, it’s done. You may see a few error messages about an “invalid argument” while the command is running. You can ignore those. If you get an error message with the words “Permission denied,” enter this:
sudo !!
You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.
Next, boot from your recovery partition by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.
When the recovery desktop appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar.
In the Terminal window, enter “resetpassword” (without the quotes) and press return. A Reset Password window opens. You’re not going to reset the password.
Select your boot volume if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select ▹ Restart from the menu bar.
Wow. Looks like fun. I'll give it a go. Thanks. It'll be a while until I do tho. The backup still has nine hours to go acording to the timeline (even tho it said 5 hrs an hour ago)
Well, and this might be a germaine follow-up question. One reason the backup is so large (625 GB), and why I decided to do this, is an enormous keychain folder on the system disk. When I was trying to pare-down the contents so as not to have to move EVERYTHING I noticed an inordinately large keychain folder (almost 200 GB). When I tried to look into its contents the computer would completely bog down and the wheel would keep on spinning, never revealing the contents; either the window would remain blank or if I clicked on the reveal triangle in list view nothing would happen. All the while the HD would be churning away. I've been trying to find out the meaning of this to no avail.
Then again, would this clean reinstall I'm prepping for render all the above needless?
Then again, would this clean reinstall I'm prepping for render all the above needless?
No. The clean install will almost certainly have no effect on the problem. It's a waste of time.
Alrighty...
When you said it would take a "noticeable amount of time" I was thinking like five minutes or so. Start-to-finish has taken around two hours! But I did it and here are the results:
--I no longer have to type in my system password every time I blink my eyes. Yay.
--I no longer (at least this first time) have automatically launch at restart: Compressor, Transmit, Mail, iCal and Chrome. Yay
--In the drive where I backed up the system disk there were a few apps that refused to let me move them into the appliations folder. It would ask for my password and then a box would appear telling me to Get Info and make sure my permissions were as they should be for such a maneuver. Of course they were but no go anyway so they sat in the main directory outside of the Application folder. That has not changed. Boo.
--I still cannot look into the 200 GB Keychains folder in user>Library without locking things up and sending the "kernel task" running up to nearly 600MB...which it is doing as I type this. Boo.
--The window of one of my FW drives still does not display correctly; it will not show its sidebar and column heading in list view are a different type face and the column widths cannot be changed. Meh.
So I dunno. I still wonder if I should do a clean reinstall...
...and kernel task keeps on a'churnin...
Please run the following shell command in the same way as before and post the output:
ls -AOel Library/Keychains
I assume you mean instead of the "chmod -R -N ~" command. I'm not an afficianado of such esoterica as "shell commands."
I did it and got hundreds upon hundreds of lines of code; so many I can't imagine I should post all of that. Seriously. Hundreds. But this is the first two "paragraphs" which are completely representative of the entirety of the output:
total 382963208
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 0 Dec 31 15:45 .fl0D1D1BA9
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 0 Jun 24 2008 .fl62323D2F
drwxr-xr-x 3 bruno staff - 102 Feb 17 2010 .syncinfo
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 547644 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-04FyWe
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0517VI
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-05ZhXo
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-08kbtG
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-09XB8T
0: group:everyone deny delete
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0A94sp
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0CcfvV
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0ElKEV
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0KSi6M
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0LGmW2
0: group:everyone deny delete
The final few lines read:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bruno staff - 548820 Apr 24 13:28 login.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-zzyvvt
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-0QxBtn
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-9lsifd
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-A1ilse
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-Gsjo0j
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-HktBKJ
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-LnLZXh
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-MwQfed
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-cuvxjE
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-fxEU6x
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-hh646O
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-w2OUtO
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-58a33d74-yPxvhd
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-10XBon
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-1kHHGr
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-3oLYIm
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-9SXkuh
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-9bQHXs
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-9laNbu
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-CFIYxn
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-Ecqxl1
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-H7yCVs
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-LsSGEI
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-Mdpjrv
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-NFB7LU
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-Q56d7Z
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-QKXdKq
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-RGmDCW
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-U74aeh
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-VEWQl0
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-VqBYBN
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-WFFmsy
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-akAtoA
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-eNoZRS
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-iib7Yw
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-k7cq7J
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-lOL4Rw
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-ne8aQq
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-oeuWpi
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-q0VxPg
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-qm8ILL
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-ssedWO
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-t5rLkF
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-ujbqv1
-rw-r--r-- 1 bruno staff - 23148 Apr 25 10:24 metadata.keychain.sb-a51a13a2-wcnsYN
brunettins-imac:~ bruno$
brunettins-imac:~ bruno$
That's insane. You've installed some kind of crapware that has been filling up your drive with copies of the keychains. It seems to have stopped.
First, back up all data.
Then delete the copies as follows:
rm Library/Keychains/*.keychain.sb-*
Don't type this command. Watch that folder to make sure they don't start breeding again.
Well. How do you like that? Can't imagine what I might have installed lately that would have compromised things. I don't recall adding anything untoward. My wife blames the ****...that's a joke btw.
Well the data's all backed up already since I was preparing to reinstall the system before we started this conversation. But I don't understand your directive. From where am I deleting this "rm Library/Keychains/*.keychain.sb-*"? (remember, I'm not an afficianado) Is this something in the notoriously bloated Keychains folder? Because I have been unable to get in there (apparently because of this very issue). If you'll recall above I mentioned the system bogs down when I try to look at its contents so I'v been avoiding it. Perhaps I'll try accessing it and just walk away for a few and give it a chance to get out of the weeds.
But to your assertion that the multiplying seems to have stopped, my HD has finally stopped chattering away for no reason. It had been running on non-stop as thoough I was doing some data-intensive operation when in fact I was doing absolutely nothing (the kernel_task in the Activity Monitor was quite active)...but that's odd, I just opened the A.M. window and kernel_task is just as active as before but the HD is quiet. Weird.
BTW thanks for your help here.
alan b
That's another shell command.
Oh, I see. I was thrown off when you wrote "don't type it in" You meant "copy and paste" I presume.
But still not clear on what to expect from this action. Does this shell command delete them?
Holy cow! I did open up the Keychains folder and walk away for a while and the window did finally materialize with its contents. There are 357,284 "login.keychain.sb"s in there! What on earth happened here?
I ran the shell command and this is what was reported:
brunettins-imac:~ bruno$ rm Library/Keychains/*.keychain.sb-*
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
brunettins-imac:~ bruno$
Is it saying there are too many keychains to deal with? Should I just try and trash them? Then again, don't I need SOME of them? I don't know if this means anything but 99.9999% of them are dated 24 April and are all 549 KB in size. There are 45 called "metadata.keychain.sb-xxx" dated 25 April and they're all 23 KB. Then there is one from 22 May again called "login.keychain.sb-xxx" and again the same 549 KB as the others. Very strange.
Somehow you need to get rid of those copies. I don't have time to explain shell commands. If you don't like them, and you can navigate the Keychains folder in the Finder, move to the Desktop the files login.keychain and metadata.keychain. Then move the Keychains folder to the Trash. Try to empty the Trash (you may not be able to.) Create a new folder with exactly the same name in the same place, and put the two keychain files into it. You'll need to re-add them in the Keychain Access application.
It's not that I don't like them--sorry to mislead--what I mean is that I just don't know anything about them.
I take it it doesn't matter which keychain and which metadata files I choose?
I'll give it a go and reprt back. Thanks.
I don't know whether it matters or not. I'm assuming that all those files are copies, because they're the same size, but I don't know for sure that they're identical. I suggest you follow my last instructions.
Avoiding old bugs upon reinstall
