What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I had a nasty scare - I was trying to migrate my son's old MacBook to a new MacBook Pro we just got him at the Apple store. The migration was going over WiFi and was going to take 14 hours. I hooked up ethernet cables, but it wasn't smart enough to detect the new and faster transport. With each passing minute, the time to finish was going up! This was bad and getting worse.

So I decided to kill it by shutting off the old machine and then the new. I then restarted the process, but decided moving my account wasn't necessary - Huge Mistake! Mine was the Administrator account. So when I got done transferring his, mine was in an incomplete state - all messed up, and his wasn't an admin! We were sunk.

No install disk. No way around it. Well and truly hosed.

Then I saw this: How to restart the setup process. If I could get that going again, and transfer my account this time, we'd be set. So here's what I had to do: Restart the Mac holding down Cmd-s to get into single-user mode, and type:

  $ /sbin/mount -uw /
  $ rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
  $ exit

at this point, I got to restart the setup process and I could re-transfer my account. Once that was done, I could make his account an admin and we're safe.

That was a close one. No fun at all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2012 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Apple, Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.