Hi Rose,
Thanks for posting about your solution, and very glad that you solved
your problems. I wanted to just state that creating an alternate user
account on your Mac before problems occur is a very good thing to do.
For one thing, it ensures that you always have a way to log into your
machine in the event of problems with your account. It also lets you
test whether the problems require system-wide fixes, or whether these
are local to your account.
Another thing that I find useful is to periodically make a bootable
cloned backup of my MacBook hard drive, which you can do with Carbon
Copy Cloner from Bombich Software or with SuperDuper! using the free
trial version. (If your main hard drive is very full, and you have a
large disk, this could take up to 5 hours for a complete clone). I
usually make such a backup before I do a major system update, so in
the event of a problem booting from the install CD/DVD, its always
possible to boot off the clone and run any repair or diagnostic
functions. You simply attache the cloned drive to a USB or Firewire
Port, then boot your computer while holding down the Option key. Once
the boot process initiates, you press the right (or left) arrow key
and then press the return key to indicate that you want to switch your
boot drive from the default. Your system will use your (working)
cloned drive, and you can still repair permissions, etc. on the main
hard drive using the utilities from the cloned drive. You can also
directly check and compare key files.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Oct 23, 2010, at 17:53, Rose Morales wrote:
Thanks.
It was a bit of work and time consuming. I never want to go through
something like this again. So I'm hoping that someone reads this and
saves themselves a lot of time and worry.
Oh, one more thing for Courtney and anyone else who is keeping track
of the steps I took for just-in-case measures, after you give
yourself read/write access, you want to go to the actions button and
select apply to all enclosed items. THis will apply the permissions
on the selected folder to all of the files and folders inside that
one. Again, sorry I'm so scattered. I'm just mentally exhausted from
this whole thing.
On Oct 23, 2010, at 11:44 PM, Courtney Curran wrote:
Hi,
This is great news, I'm really happy for you that you were able to
get everything working with no sighted help. Now if this happens to
me, I know what to do, wish I was better with terminal though,
(smiley).
Courtney
On 23/10/2010, at 11:29 in the Afternoon, Rose Morales wrote:
Hi all,
I have spent a good portion of my day getting my baby back up and
running. I'm still not done. I have been a mac user for a year
and a half now, and in this time, I have learned much about my
mac. Yet this problem and fixing it has taught me so much about my
mac that I figured it was worth sharing my solution with you all.
This post will not be as eloquent as I'm generally known for. It's
been a long day. But I hope you guys enjoy all the same.
Just a quick recap. I could hear my Skype and Adium sounds, but VO
was not speaking. Yet I knew it was running because I have enough
vision to see whether screen curtain is on or off. I wanted to
boot VO from CD, but that wasn't working. So I was very worried
that Voiceover had been affected systemwide. Now for my adventure.
I was completely beside myself and not really sure of what to do.
I'd been hanging around in irc on my iphone when one of my really
knowledgeable mac friends popped into the room. The first thing he
suggested was to try repairing file permissions. I replied that I
could not boot from CD. He asked me if I could SSH into my mac; I
said yes. So he told me to try a "diskutil verifyPermissions /".
He told me to restart my mac, which I did. Still no speech. Then
he told me to type say followed by a message. I knew about this
command but hadn't thought of it. This command will make your
system voice say something if it can. Alex did not speak when I
tried the command as a normal user, but it worked when I did a
"sudo su", giving myself root access, and then executing say. This
led us to the reasonable conclusion that my user had somehow lost
Voiceover's permission to speak. Since repairing file permissions
did not fix this, the only solution we could think of was to
create a new account. But how to do so without sighted help. My
friend had found me an awesome article about creating accounts via
the command line, but I thought, hmmmm. I wonder if there is a way
to log in as root via the gui. Another friend told me that "sudo
pass" would allow for this. I was asked for my current user pass
and then for a root password. I rebooted the computer, attempted
to log in, and voila! Voiceover was speaking quite happily.
With control of my computer now back, I created my new account
using system preferences. I moved over my data, but what's this?
No permission to read documents, library, movies, etc. With some
fiddling, I was able to fix this. I navigated to each of the
offending folders, hit command-i for file info, and navigated to
sharing and permissions. There's a lock right next to that
triangle if you tab once. I unchecked it and entered my user
password. Then I hit selected add, users and groups, my user
account, and hit the select button. In the privileges table, I
selected my account, which currently only had read-only access. I
selected read and write from the pulldown.
In short, I need to finish moving my data over, which I will do
tomorrow, but my macbook pro is very much back to normal.
Allison's suggestion ended up doing the trick, but I wanted to
share my experiences with you all from the perspective of someone
who had no sighted help. I also wanted to provide some insight as
to why this particular problem would even occur, as I'm sure some
of you may have been curious.
Have a lovely rest of the weekend,
Rose
On Oct 22, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Allison Manzino wrote:
Hi,
No I hadn't thought of loading VO from the CD, I like RIcardo's
info, and will save it for future reference. My Mom had to help
me create another account, I didn't do it all by myself. Couldn't
have done it without her, smile. I hope you get this rectified.
Musically,
Allison
My birds are winged blessings, they help me soar!
On Oct 22, 2010, at 2:02 PM, Nothingvutlime wrote:
HHmmm. I hadn't thought of creating another account. I will get
Mom or Dad to help me with that later. One quick question
though. When you had this issue, did you try loading vo from cd?
Because that didn't work for me either. I'm wondering if there's
a bigger problem.
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 22, 2010, at 12:40 PM, Allison Manzino <gwennac...@gmail.com
> wrote:
Hi there,
THis happened when I forgot to quit Audio Hijack Pro. THe only
way I could get VO to relaunch itself was to create another
account. Since my Mac wasn't full of things at the time, this
didn't matter and wasn't a problem. The apple support team was
stumped as to why this occurred. Now, every time I use Audio
Hijack, after I finish recording, I end my session, I always
wait a few seconds, check the recordings in my docks, which is
the folder I have all my AH stuff in, and then hit command Q
while I'm in AH. I hope this helps. I have never had another
problem with VO and AH again. Have a wonderful day and good
luck getting this resolved. Please let me know if there is
anything I can do to help.
Musically,
Allison
My birds are winged blessings, they help me soar!
On Oct 22, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Nothingvutlime wrote:
Hi all,
I launched Audio Hijack Pro while on Skype with someone
yesterday and hijacked system audio. Vo was having issues with
pretty much any program I went into. It was saying busy every
time I tried to VO around. So I force quit AHP. VO stopped
working, so I restarted. I heard my Skype and Adium sounds,
signaling that both programs had been launched successfully.
I invoked screen curtain, and I could see that it was on. But
no peep from VO, not even to say it was muted. I tried VO-f10,
which I believe mutes and unmutes VO, but that didn't work.
I'm honestly stuck. I force quit a few programs, no other ones
which I remember by name. This is the only one I remember and
the only one I think could have caused this mess. My theory
is that VO is still going to Sound Flour, and I don't know how
to tell it to stop. I can always ssh or sftp in and nuke my
VO prefs. I'm pretty sure they're in Library. But I'm afraid
of this having harmful affects. Any help would be appreciated.
Sent from my iPhone
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