I was doing the tutorial when I arrived at the
point were it said to write
sudo chmod g-w /
this didn't work apparently because I couldn't receive mail.
So being a curious rather reckless learner with nothing to lose I tried various other things. I eventualy (not knowing what I was doing albeit I now do) I tried various variations on the above command.
Then I wrote:
sudo chmod -g-w /
Yes I know it wasn't smart but i'm reckless, so the computer decided that if no one was to have privleges I should be seeing the desktop at all, so the screen went blue and I was forced to reboot in os 9 on my second partition.
Now i obviously can't reboot in os 10 because once it loads it cant login in as a user (neither my account nor the roots because all privileges were erased).
I would like to know if there is a way to regain control over my partition or recuperate the data while in my os 9 partition without using data recovery software?
the only thing i can think of is a cold boot. If you have the OS X installation cd, insert the it and type command C. This tells the computer to boot directly off the cd. I dont know if you can retrieve your files from before the crash this way though. If you cant you can eject the cd and no harm done as long as you dont reinstall.