allysaurus Posted December 19, 2009 Share Posted December 19, 2009 I've spent the past few hours pouring over my mac and I need serious help. I think I really screwed things up. This is the sequence of things I did, and if anyone could help asap that would mean the world to me: (For reference, I have a white Macbook with either 10.4.11 or 10.4.1 Tiger OS I think) 1) I wanted to clean up my Mac a bit so I googled it and someone suggested going to Disk Utility and erasing my free space. So I clicked "Erase Free Space" and it took about 25 minutes. Then a window popped up saying something like I didn't have anymore free space left, so I panicked and clicked "Skip" But it didn't close so I force quitted (I know, I'm an idiot) 2) I checked "Get Info" under Mac HD and discovered I had zero free space, when originally I had over 30GB. I panicked and googled...and found out that erasing free space puts everything in a temporary file, and in order to solve my problem I needed to trash a file called EFTFile1.sparse or something like that. 3) I couldn't find the file, so I logged out and logged back in. Then I saw it in my trash in the Recovered files folder, but when I tried to delete it it said that I couldn't because it was still in use. 4) A site on google said I needed to login as a root user, so I went to Netinfo under Utilities and enabled the root user. I typed in a password that matches the general security password of my Mac, and logged out with the intention of logging back in in order to delete the file. 5) But when I logged back out, the login window popped up with my name and asking for a password, which it never did before. I figured it wanted my root user password that I just created (which matches my normal password) so I typed it in but it didn't work. I tried a million ways of typing it in, figuring I must have mispelled something, but it didn't work. 6) I held down the power key 7) Ever since then, my computer loads all the way to the blue screen with the white window and the blue loading bar. The bar loads all the way to 100%, but my desktop never appears. I've repaired my disk and everything using my install disk. I'm not too great with computers but I tried doing the safe boot and everything...I did the single user mode and it booted up that black screen with the white words and I did that fsck command and rebooted. Nothing seems to be working!!! I know I can probably do an archive and install, but am I missing something? I was thinking maybe my computer doesn't have enough free space to reboot, but under Disk Utility it says it has 5GB which should be enough right? I was also thinking maybe I screwed up when I enabled the root user, and that's why it won't log me in? Someone please help! I'm desperate. I've been hitting myself in the head for the past few hours ever since I stupidly decided to erase the free space. STUPID STUPID STUPID Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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