I’ve never heard of an account being downgraded to Standard from Admin
during an upgrade. That is crazy. You’re right. That should Never occur.
Question and, again, I might have missed this part of the discussion. If
you have a time machine backup of the system, can you do a complete erase of
the drive and either reinstall Mojave or install Catalina? Also, another option
might be if you can get into recovery mode and then disk utility, perhaps add
an APFS volume to your system and then install a copy of Catalina on that and
migrate from Time Machine. If that works, erase the original volume and just
use the new one?
Take Care
John D. Panarese
Director
Mac for the Blind
Tel, (631) 724-4479
Email, john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Website, http://www.macfortheblind.com
APPLE CERTIFIED SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL (ACSP)
Apple Certified Trainer (ACT)
Apple Performance Partner
MAC and iOS VOICEOVER TRAINING AND SUPPORT
On Feb 2, 2020, at 2:11 PM, Martin McCormick <martin.m@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Panarese <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I’m confused as to how there is no administrative account at all?
One cannot set up a Mac without, at least, the starting Admin account. I
think I missed this topic, so I apologize if this was explained already.
You are 100% correct. I upgraded from mojave to catalina
and my administrative account turned in to a general user
account. There are 0 admin accounts on the Mac in question.
When talking with Apple Tec Support, I stressed that this
should never happen and they agreed. I said that catalina and
newer upgrades should test for this condition and pester the
daylights out of whoever is upgrading until they give an
administrator name and password or be really smart and see that
there is only one active account so that user ID must be the
administrator.
This shouldn't be a problem in business and industry
computers because there will be the account that the worker has
plus an admin account that the IT department has which is the
administrator.
The fellow I talked to at Apple was very nice but I told
him that this possibility shouldn't even have gotten out of the
door much less happened to end users.
I am currently playing with the Recovery mode, a time
machine backup of the crippled system and a lot of swear words,
trying to get admin access again. Those words, "Click the lock
to make changes" just make me groan these days. This system is
frozen in the state it was when I was stupid enough to do that
upgrade.
I'd love to roll it back to mojave. As a resident of
Oklahoma, I am angry enough to almost be able to throw it to the
Mojavi desert. That's about 1500 miles due West of here.
Here's a list of what not to waste your time trying to
do:
Do not think you can start in single-user-mode as in
Command + s.
That used to give you a unix root shell. Apple has now
shot that down.
Do not think you can go in to recovery mode, thinking
"I'lll just bring up that dropdown menu and call up the terminal.
Apple shot that down too. If you have a peon user account like I
do now, that doesn't even showup on the screen.
I understand what Apple is trying to do. Having worked
for 25 years at Oklahoma State University's IT department in
network operations where we kept the data flowing and the phones
ringing, I am intimately aware of the need for security but you
can fall victim to what I like to call securinoia in which it's
more like denial of service than protection.
The folks at Apple said my alternatives are to use the
terminal program in recovery mode which none of us realized is
not an option to non-admins or wipe the system and reinstall from
bare metal which is enormously time-consuming and I do even have
1 good backup.
You're probably sorry you asked, but I'm telling you and
the list where we are these days.
So far, I've made this mac unbootable but voiceover in
Recovery Mode still talks
Martin McCormick
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