Apple ate my computer!

[BenBurch]

Argh. I am glad I back up. Leopard left only one of my defined users active, and that one did not have administrative privileges to make things right!

I am doing a re-install now. I'd hate to have to restore the backup with all the hassle that entails.

[Terry]

Interesting. I've done an upgrade, an archive/install/restore, and a "just nuke it" and they all worked fine. Just out of morbid curiosity, what model mac was it, and what were you upgrading from?

[BenBurch]

Interesting. I've done an upgrade, an archive/install/restore, and a "just nuke it" and they all worked fine. Just out of morbid curiosity, what model mac was it, and what were you upgrading from?

21" Core Duo iMac, and upgrading from 10.4.8 or whatever the most recent thing Software Update came up with was.

I really wish I had done an archive/install, but I chose upgrade.

NEVER again will I choose that option.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I've never upgraded the OS on a personal computer in my life. I wait until it's time for a new machine, install the latest OS from scratch, and then bring over all my stuff.

~~ Paul

[wahrheit]

With the price for huge external USB drives being as low as it is now, I'll just get one of those, backup everything, and do a clean install.

[BenBurch]

Here is what I had to do to get going again; I reset the password for the root account (it never had one before, intentionally!) Then I was able to reboot and log in. Then I created a new user record for myself. It adopted the files that were already there.

However, I lost my keychain and crontab file (I do a lot of work on the command line) but otherwise things are OK.

[DoubtingStephen]

Is it possible that the accounts had originally been created on an older Mac running Panther? I've heard of problems that have occurred if a user account had a password greater than 8 characters long. Earlier versions of OS X did allow such long passwords, but Tiger (10.4) did not. So this clearly does not apply to your Intel iMac unless you had migrated those accounts from a prior machine, since all Intel Macs have shipped with Tiger until now.

I did Upgrade installations of Leopard on a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, and an Intel CoreDuo iMac without any troubles at all.

[BenBurch]

Is it possible that the accounts had originally been created on an older Mac running Panther? I've heard of problems that have occurred if a user account had a password greater than 8 characters long. Earlier versions of OS X did allow such long passwords, but Tiger (10.4) did not. So this clearly does not apply to your Intel iMac unless you had migrated those accounts from a prior machine, since all Intel Macs have shipped with Tiger until now.

I did Upgrade installations of Leopard on a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, and an Intel CoreDuo iMac without any troubles at all.

Yes, these accounts go back to 10.1 and have been imported all along the way.

That must be the issue. The one that stayed was created after I was on the Intel machine.

Apple clearly missed that usage scenario in testing!

[DoubtingStephen]

Well, I'm sorry you had so much trouble, but hopefully knowing more about why it happened eases the pain a bit.

I certainly agree that Apple ought to have caught this, or else simply truncated the long passwords and then TOLD YOU what had happened. Here is an Apple Support article about the issue you ran into.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306840