MrsKase
Level 1 (8 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Adjusted User Permissions and Lost Control

Hi --

 

I'm posting in here in hopes that someone can help me undo the colossal mistake I made.

 

My computer is currently running El Capitan. The other day, during a disk clean up, I went into "get info" on my HD and changed the permissions to the following: deleted the "wheel" and set "everyone" to "no access". My computer immediately proceeded to stop allowing me to do anything.

 

I called Apple Care and we did the following:

We rebooted into restore mode and tried running the disk Repair, but that was unsuccessful. We then went into the disk utility terminal and tried to run the "sudo diskutil repairPermissions /" command, but that also found itself to be unsuccessful. Command line returned "sudo: command not found".

 

The technician left me with the task of trying to reinstall the operating system and said "sometimes it will just repair the operating system and your data may be okay, but not a high likelihood, and no promises." I have not  followed through on this task As of yet.

 

I am searching for any other options before going that route, as there are some files that are currently not backed up and I would love to save if possible. Can anyone help? Thank you!

OBS MacBook Pro (15-inch 2.4/2.2 GHz)

Posted on Oct 17, 2016 5:15 PM

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MrsKase

Q: Adjusted User Permissions and Lost Control

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  • Helpful answers

  • by leroydouglas,Helpful

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Oct 18, 2016 3:03 PM in response to MrsKase
    Level 7 (24,160 points)
    Notebooks
    Oct 18, 2016 3:03 PM in response to MrsKase

    If you have a current backup I would restore from that.

     

    ref: How to create a boot clone

     

    If not, no harm in running the installer again on top of your existing OS X (macOS)

  • by Barney-15E,Helpful

    Barney-15E Barney-15E Oct 18, 2016 3:04 PM in response to MrsKase
    Level 9 (50,881 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 18, 2016 3:04 PM in response to MrsKase

    If you didn't "Apply to Enclosed" from the gear menu, print out these instructions and try to correct via Single User Mode.

    Boot into Single-user Mode by holding down cmd-s on restart.

    The boot screen will tell you to do this, but here are the first commands to run:

    /sbin/fsck -fy

    /sbin/mount -uw /

    Next, run these:

    /usr/bin/chgrp wheel /

    /bin/chmod 755 /

    reboot

    The first two check the file system then mount the startup volume.

    The next set the group to wheel and set the POSIX permissions back to what they should be.

    Then, you tell it to reboot normally.

     

    Note that there is a space before the last / character.

     

    You should never mess around with things you don't fully understand (which is how you got here in the first place), so it may be safer to reinstall the OS as leroydouglas suggested. While those commands will not cause any more damage than you already have done, you may inadvertently mis-type something that will cause more damage or data loss.