Software :: Recover Deleted Account From Terminal?

I am very new to Macs. Recently I was given the job of trying to fix a G4 for the town's public access committee. I ended up buying a used G4 and swapping out the HD and cards. All was well but no one could remember the old password, so nothing could be updated.

So I used: "/sbin/mount -uaw" "rm /var/db/.applesetupdone" "reboot" and setup a new account from which I could change the original account's password; then chose the original account to be the default boot.

In the original account I was able to update all the software, (except a 168 MB combined update for OS 10.4) and decided to delete the new account just to get things back to how they were before.

Mistake. The new account must have been made the root account, because now the system hangs at the Mac OS X screen and the progress bar never gets any blue.

The above commands in terminal don't go beyond "...applesetupdone", which receives a "no such file or directory" response.