Intel Mac :: Deleted Some Files In A Folder Named "private"?
May 15, 2012I deleted some files in a folder named "private" on my drive and now my imac will not boot up.
Info:
iMac (24-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I deleted some files in a folder named "private" on my drive and now my imac will not boot up.
Info:
iMac (24-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I have accidentally deleted the Private folder in the root of the HD. Now OSX will not boot. The folder is still sitting in my Trash folder and I would like from the Boot CD Terminal to copy back from the trash to the Macintosh HD/ location.
View 13 Replies View RelatedI deleted my /Private folder. I'm not sure how I was able to but I think I deleted some random little files in my Mac HD before that and I do recall entering my password (the administrative / master password) to authorize the deletion. So that's how I got into this situation. I'd just also like to say that I do not have my information backed up.
What I Have Tried:
- Rebooting in Single-User mode following some code I found off a forum for someone who had only deleted their /var folder- Failed!
- Rebooting in SU mode following code off Apple Support website- Failed!
- Called 1-800-MY-APPLE - was told I could only reinstall everything- Failed!
- Went into the Genius Bar to talk to a Genius. He tried to start up remotely with an External HD- Failed!
- Was told by the Genius to take a firewire cable and hook up my computer to another Mac and start in Target Disk mode, move all my data onto there (or an external HD attached to computer 2) and then reinstall - Failed! (Reason: The second computer could not detect my computer? Indexing was taking forever but I couldn't stop Spotlight from indexing because I could not find it... My disk / the icon does not appear on the desktop. BUT, it was detected through Time Machine.)
I deleted the "hidden" private folder on my mac, but that still on trash. Now the big problems are:
- when I try to open Terminal to move the folder from the trash to my hard disk, appears a message that says: the administrator doesn't specified your shell with a legal value.
- I can't change the date and time;
- well almost nothing.
Ugh. So I was cleaning out my HD with 'WhatSize' and saw the 'private folder', which was about 4.6 GB. Thinking nothing of it and also suspecting that this might be the folder responsible for the my auto-depleting harddrive I trashed it. Upon stupidly emptying the trash I found that some files were emptied while most of them survived. Noticing that I wasn't able to open iTunes or even reinstall it, I restarted the computer.
Now, I can't get into Snow Leopard and have to use Windows (I have Bootcamp). I tried doing the "ditto /volumes..." command in single-user mode, but it says it couldn't find my username. I tried looking up the username with the 'launch ctl load' command, but it can't find the Directory Services file. Is there any way I can get Snow Lepoard back without losing any space? I have a lot of important media that I would really like to keep (photos, films, music, etc.)
I deleted my private folder. It's still in the trash, and it's also in my applications folder if that makes a difference. I turned off my mac and now I can't boot it back up. I can boot into single user mode and tried entering some codes in there but I keep getting errors. I have a new Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard, and I have the install disk but I can't get the computer to start up with it.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI accidentally trashed my private folder and then emptied my trash. I have looked into it and everyone has answers on how to reinstall it if I didn't empty the trash but the issue is I did empty the trash. My computer won't start up all the way as you would imagine. I have my disk and everything but I do not have all of my things backed up or archived.
My issue is I can easily reinstall Mac OS X 10.4 but I have some vital videos and footage for a video we are working on that I cannot deleted or take the chance of losing. Does anyone know a way I can back up the movie files or any way of doing anything of that sort? This is very important I do not have the tapes anymore with the raw footage on it so if I lose this footage pretty much our last year of work and filming is ruined and so is our release date in two weeks.
Recently I have been getting the 'Low Space on Startup Disk" error and see that out of 297GB I gave zero KB left!. After downloading Disk Inventory X I saw that there is a folder in my (Macintosh HD > Library > Logs) named Google and it is 128GB! What does this folder do and why is it so big?
View 12 Replies View RelatedOn my MacBook, when I delete a file in the Downloads folder, it says that it will go immediately and for some reason it doesn't go to Trash. On my iMac, the behaviour is as I expect, it goes to Trash and I can undo it. Is there a way to change it on the MacBook so it goes to Trash? I'm using 10.6.3.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have Microsoft Word for Mac on my Macbook. My husband deleted a folder with my word documents and he has already deleted the trash folder. Can I recover the folder? How do I recover my deleted files?
Info:
MacBook Pro
A phantom folder with the name of a folder that held photos has appeared in my finders>places list. I can't choose it to delete it. It won't move. It can't be found in a search. How can I choose it and delete it?
Info:
imac, Mac OS X (10.4.11)
So my computer has about 4gb of free space on the hd. I leave for a few minutes, come back and see in the finder that there is 0KB! It also won't let me do anything, not even quit itunes because it says it can't save the library file. It's weird because the computer was idle, I'm pretty sure the only open app was iTunes.
So I restart the computer but nothing has changed. So I transfer a bunch of files to an external HD then delete them. So I now have free space. I want to know where the space went though? I opened OmniDiskSweeper to see what's taking up space and I see this folder called "private" that I've never seen before. Where is this located and could this be the space that disappeared? I included a screenshot so you can see where the folder is.
I was wondering how to get into my private folder? where is that located, what is the path?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI know this has been asked before and I asked it once too, but I don't understand all these technical terms and nothing I did worked. I've now got over 20GB in this "private" folder as I saw in Disc Inventory X. I cannot find this folder anywhere when I search and I cannot delete it.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI realised a big chunk of my hard drive space missing and couldn't find where it had gone. I downloaded Disk Inventory and ran the program. It shows that i have a folder called 'Private' within this are three sub folders:
Var
Log
Asl
I have searched for all of these and can't find them on my hard drive anywhere. Can anyone tell me what these are, if I can delete them and if so how do I find them.
I was wondering if it is possible to make a certain folder password protected? If so, how would I do that? I only want to require password on one specific folder.
View 24 Replies View RelatedJust did it by mistake. Now the Mac can not show up the log in screen anymore. How can I recover from it.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI was searching around on Google trying to find a way of creating a private folder, all I found was articles saying that you had to create a disk image of a folder, the only problem is that the whole password system wouldn't always work. So I thought of a better way, what you do is with the folder you wish to create private open the Get Info panel. Then open the Sharing & Permissions panel, enter your user password if prompted, turn all of them to drop box only, then click the lock, users will now only be able to view this folder if they unlock the panel with your user password and then change the style.
View 20 Replies View RelatedFor some reason unknown to me, my "private" folder is visible. I've done all the "usual" things and even have an Automator action that shows and hides invisible files, but I just can't make it invisible again. Now this isn't really a BAD thing as I know how to poke around in there, but still... it's a mystery to me.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI moved my Mac HD's private folder to the trash not knowing that it stores thousands of crucial UNIX folders (one of which that stores the admin password). I haven't yet trashed it, but I can't move it back to its original location because when I try to do that Leopard asks for the admin password but the password doesn't exist anymore because it's been moved to the trash. Is there anyway I can remove the private folder from the Trash and put it back? Maybe some kind of Terminal command?
View 3 Replies View RelatedFor some reason this is now visible in my hard drive's root. How do I hide it again? I don't wanna go near that thing!
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have some files on my desktop right now that I would like to secure from wondering eyes. Other people use my Macbook Pro from time to time and I don't want anyone to read these documents. Is there a way to create a folder/file that requires a password to gain entry to view the contents of this folder/file?
View 17 Replies View RelatedI have a strange "/private" folder in my root directory (Macintosh HD) after a Time Capsule restore today. The folder is ~5GB in size, and appears to have been created during the restore process. The files in the folder have strange-appearing "system" file type names. Can I safely delete this folder? Not sure why its there, but given its size, I'd prefer to delete it.
View 5 Replies View RelatedThey are taking up 200 GB of my hard drive. how I could stop this or if it is even safe to delete them?
Info:mini 1.1, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
I recently opened my system files and noticed a file called deferred install. When I tried to open it ,it told me I was denied access to this file even though I am the owner and only user of this computer.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
I have tried moving them to the trash, as well as using the move to trash button. They seam to go to the trash can but when I delete the trash they are still in the file. I am trying to clear out some old files so that I can have room on my start up disk. My Disk is full and it is making it hard for me to open more then one file. I am getting an external hard drive soon but don't want these files on it.
Info:
iMac
I have a group of docs on my MBP that contain private stuff - bank a/c details etc...
Now I keep those files in an encrypted sparse disk image and I'm reasonably confident that if my MBP is stolen they won't be able to access that disk image.
But this just occurred to me: when I open those files in Pages is there a temp copy of the file save somewhere outside of the sparse disk image that could be found?
I really don't want to use file vault to encrypt the whole disk but I do want to be sure those private files won't get accessed.
After every reboot or restart, I just started seeing a new file named "Recovered files" in the trash containing fonts. All fonts in there are system fonts. I remember this happening in OS9 but I never had this in OSX before. I close all apps before shutting down.OSX 10.5.8 Dual 2.3 GHz PPC G5 5 GB DDR2 SDRAM NVIVIA GeForce 6600 256 VRAM
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have a MacPro (Intel), and I had my Music folder on a second (non-boot) internal drive. That drive was getting full, so I bought yet another internal drive to put in one of the other bays, thinking to copy the folders to the new, larger-capacity drive. So I bought a 2 Tb drive and transferred all my MOVIES to the new drive, but then went back and deleted my MUSIC folder and emptied the trash. I knew immediately that I'd made a mistake.
I haven't written anything to that drive whatsoever from that moment on, so absolutely nothing should have been over-written. I have plenty of room on the new drive to which I can recover the deleted files. Unfortunately the folder/directory was very large, with over 20,000 files, mostly of podcasts/spoken word stuff, much of which is no longer available or would represent thousands of hours of download time, plus all my digitized folk music from long out-of-print LP records.
You'd think I'd be more responsible with >600 Gb of data! However, fortunately the drive is in good working order, it just requires a good recovery strategy. I know that services that do recovery charge a fortune, and because I haven't written anything to that drive and it still mounts without problems, I'm hoping I can do this myself with a good data recovery software package. Because I am talking about literally thousands of files, it is just too painful to think about editing all the metadata about each file (name, artist, album, etc.), and ideally I would like to recover the files and the file structure so podcasts are recovered as such, etc.
Is this at all possible?
If so, what are the relative merits of File Salvage vs. Data Rescue vs. Kernel for Macintosh (Nucleus Data Recovery) vs. VirtualLab Data Recovery vs. Stellar Phoenix? Is there something better than these--these are the only ones I found on a Web search. Are there any head-to-head reviews of which someone is aware?
I'm trying to delete a bunch of unwanted files that take up a lot of space, and I'm finding this file that is 2 gigs, which labeled: private/var/vm/sleepimage, but I can't access the file or delete it. (I'm using a program called GrandPerspective which visually represents how memory is being used).
View 4 Replies View Related