I had some issues on my machine and had to reinstall macOS High Sierra from the recovery partition. Not sure if the setup didn't complete, or maybe it just didn't work as I expected, but I ended up at a login screen with no users on the machine. So I set a password for root
from single user mode and then logged into Finder as root
, and now I'd like to re-create my previous user from the existing home directory.
So on this machine there's still a /Users/username
folder with all my stuff I want to use. If I simply make a new user called username
and point it to that folder, will it work or will it erase that directory? Should I make a user with a different name, and then simply copy the contents over (while logged out of the new user, from a root terminal), or make a new user and then change the home directory to it? Maybe something involving the dscl
utility?
As long as I can preserve all the user-installed applications, settings, keychain, etc., I'm happy.