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I had an unfortunate incident with boot camp assistant last night. I was trying to get hold of the windows drivers as an iso and when it asked me where to save to, I just selected my account folder in /users. Imagine my horror when it says it is formatting. No idea why it tries to format a directory, but needless to say it has made a mess.

I now can't login with this account, I get the login prompt and it accepts my pw but after sitting there a while the spinner remains but I get a no entry sign and it just sits there spinning.

Is there anyway I can try and retrieve what was left of my user data?

  • I have tried to repair the disk. It fails.
  • I can login as guest fine, but don't think I can get to my files here?
  • recovery partition boots up fine.
  • machine has FileVault running.
  • reset password doesn't show the disk, although disk until can see it.
  • safe mode boot to main account doesn't help.
  • I don't have any other user accounts to try.

I think the os is probably ok, but obviously major prob with my profile. Can I mount the machine as a remote disk on my other mac for instance?

Any help much appreciated as my last time machine backup is pretty stale. (been away)

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  • I don't have too many details, but can't you kick OS X back into the "just installed" mode and have it create a new account? Just make an account with a different name so it doesn't overwrite whatever is still there.
    – Moshe
    May 13, 2012 at 13:33

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, it's seems not possible to create account from Lion Recovery.

It's a long shot but if you have enough space on your disk, you can create a new partition and use it to install another Mac OS Lion and get back your data (with mounting the "old" partition to do so).

After that you can get rid of the first partition or reset it with your TM Backup and add your "new" data.

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  • I tried mounting the core storage from terminal after finding a tutorial, but it was too corrupt. Have given up and resorting to time machine recovery. Thanks for the answer.
    – DanH
    May 13, 2012 at 13:26
  • Okay, sorry to read that. I hope you don't loose too much data ! Don't forget to answer the question by accepting your answer for example !
    – Ermiar
    May 13, 2012 at 13:28

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