Destroyed user account on OS X with dscl; how to restore? [migrated]
- by Sam Ritchie
I was trying to create a new user on my OS X Lion machine, and somehow managed to destroy my own user's account. Here are the steps I took; hopefully someone here can recognize what I did, and maybe identify some way around this.
First, I ran these commands:
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch /bin/bash # mistake!
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch UserShell /bin/bash
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch RealName "Elastic Search"
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch UniqueID 503 # MY uniqueID
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch PrimaryGroupID 1000
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/elasticsearch NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/elasticsearch
The big mistake I made here was using "503", which was my user's UniqueID. Immediately my shell username changed to "elasticsearch". I fiddled around, tried to change the current user with sudo su -u sritchie, but this didn't work.
On restart, only the "Elastic Search" user was available. I logged into the Lion Recovery partition and reset the root password.
After logging in as root and checking on the terminal, I made the remarkable discovery that my home folder was totally empty. I deleted the elasticsearch user, but it made no difference. I don't see anything in Deleted Users either.
The odd thing is that when I log in now as myself (sritchie) I can see desktop icons with previews. I can even open a few text files from the Downloads folder if I use the dock alias to Downloads.
Could this data be hiding somewhere? Any help would be REALLY appreciated!
Thanks,
Sam
