Re: can't verify disk
- From: E Z Peaces <cash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:23:42 -0400
Jolly Roger wrote:
In article <pZECk.35881$kh2.32357@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
E Z Peaces <cash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My aunt has a G5 iMac with Tiger. My cousin used it extensively during a visit of several days. During the visit, my aunt phoned to say she was no longer able to contact her SMTP server using mail.app. It worked after she restarted her computer.
Tonight she called to say she couldn't contact the SMTP server with mail.app or webmail. I could contact that server from my house. Restarting her computer didn't help.
She went to DU, and when she pressed "verify disk", it asked her user name and password. I've never known DU to do that. It rejected the user name and password she gave it.
Disk Utility has required an administrator name and password for certain operations for some time now (I believe since Mac OS X 10.3 - possibly earlier). This is perfectly normal.
Why would it be needed just to verify a disk? I was running through the same steps at my house. As always, DU verified my disk without asking my password.
The other thing that puzzled me was that she had to type in her user name. If Tiger ever asks my user name, it's multiple choice.
She went to System Preferences to be sure she had only one account. She had only one. She tried "change password" to see if it would accept her password. It would not.
One might think somebody had changed her password, but I don't know why anyone would have done that. Anyway, that wouldn't explain why DU now requires a user name and password to verify the disk or why she sometimes can't contact the SMTP server. What could be wrong?
If her user account is truly the only one on the machine, it's probably an administrative account. It's possible she, or someone else using her account, made changes to parts of the system that would have otherwise been protected from changes, and those changes are causing problems.
I took her there to see that she had only one account and exactly how her user name was written. When she said she wanted to change the password to be sure it was right, I said no. It surprised me that she didn't listen. I wonder if she has done it before. I wonder if in the past she had trouble because she mistyped her password, and somebody working with her thought the solution was to open Accounts in System Preferences and run through "change password."
I still wonder why DU asked her to type her user name and password in order to verify the disk.
If someone did not change her password, it could be that there is a problem preventing the authentication system from working properly. Usually if that's happening it means bad news. If this is the case, you may be able to recover from it by booting on the system install CDs that came with the computer and resetting the password as described in the following Apple support article.
Read the section titled "Resetting the original administrator account password":
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1274>
Thanks. It says you can reset the password even if you don't know the password. I hadn't realized that was possible.
Thanks. In the days of Classic, a nephew playing games on my sister's Mac got bored and deleted almost everything from the disk. I get uneasy when relatives drop in and help themselves to my computer.
The initial user account Mac OS X creates during installation is an administrator account. But running with higher privileges than needed is never a good idea. When you are logged in as administrator, everything you do, every program you run (directly or indirectly, purposefully or inadvertently) is executed with administrative privileges with access to more parts of the system than normal users. So if you make a mistake, or worse, if you unknowingly run a trojan / worm in that account, you can damage and alter critical system files with little or no acknowledgment from the system. Remember that some files in Mac OS X are owned by the "admin" group, of which the administrator account is a member. The Applications folder is just one example of such a folder. When you are logged in as administrator, Mac OS X allows you to modify these files at will.
And you certainly wouldn't want to allow someone else to use your administrative account unsupervised if they might make changes that can adversely affect the system!
It seems as if I could use three accounts: visitor, personal, and administrator. In past experimenting, one drawback I found was that more accounts meant more possibilities of forgetting a password. Another was that switching between accounts was a bit of a hassle.
Still, it seems worth pursuing. Hmmmm... as long as I don't reveal my password, I could use the same one for all accounts! I wonder how conveniently one can switch between accounts.
.
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