Migration assistant ate admin account

I got a new (used) iMac G5 and used the migration assistant to transfer everything from my older powerbook to the new iMac. Everything transferred just fine, except...

1. The account that was transferred is listed in Preferences->Accounts, but does not appear in the list of user accounts at login. Therefore I cannot select that account to login. Somehow, since it is visible in Preferences->Accounts I can select it there to automatically login. That is the only way I can use that account.

2. The transferred account has admin priveleges according to Account settings, but I cannot use these credentials to authenticate.

3. On a hunch I disabled the admin priveleges for initial administrator account. This was the only account on the computer when I got it. I could authenticate as admin using that account, but now that I have revoked admin priveleges for that account there is effectively no administrator account since I can't authenticate using any other account.

Any ideas how to get things working correctly?

Thanks,
Eric

iMac G5 1.9ghz, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Jan 7, 2007 5:10 PM

18 replies

Eric Batte Author

Level 1

11 points

Jan 15, 2007 5:19 PM in response to Michael Conniff

Erics-iMac-G5:~ ericbatte$ nireport . /users uid gid name realname home shell | awk '$1>500 {print $0}'
501 501 Art administrator /Users/Art /bin/bash
502 502 alison Alison /Users/alison /bin/bash
502 502 ericbatte Eric Batte /Users/ericbatte /bin/bash
503 503 ebadmin ebadmin /Users/ebadmin /bin/bash
Erics-iMac-G5:~ ericbatte$ nireport . /groups name gid users | grep -v "#NoValue#"
wheel 0 root
daemon 1 root
kmem 2 root
sys 3 root
tty 4 root
operator 5 root
staff 20 root
certusers 29 root,jabber,postfix,cyrusimap
appserverusr 79 ebadmin,Art,ericbatte
admin 80 root,ebadmin,Art,ericbatte
appserveradm 81 ebadmin,Art,ericbatte
Erics-iMac-G5:~ ericbatte$

I'm not an expert at this but the first thing I notice is that 2 users have the same UID.

Niel

Level 10

741,911 points

Jan 15, 2007 5:30 PM in response to Eric Batte

Use the instructions in this article to change the numeric UID of one of the 502 accounts to 504, and then check whether the missing account shows up.

(19185)

Eric Batte Author

Level 1

11 points

Jan 16, 2007 6:29 PM in response to Niel

Thanks everyone for all of your help.

The user Alison was a new account that I made prior to running the migration assistant. It is not necessary to have this user yet so to make things simpler than the terminal commands in the article Niel posted I just deleted the user Alison since it has the conflicting UID.

That solved the problem and admin privileges are now restored to my account.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Migration assistant ate admin account