I have a secondary account on my Mac (“Standard”) for testing purposes. Today, I upgraded it to Administrator for some additional testing. When done, I attempted to downgrade it back to Standard.
No Joy.
From my regular Admin account I cannot even see that account. How is that possible?
When logged into the secondary Admin account it will [correctly] not let me downgrade.
Suggestions?
Edit-1: Fast User Switching shows all accounts from both Admin users.
Edit-2: Sequoia 15.2, M2 Studio
This is tough. It might help people if you tell us if it is Intel or Apple silicon.
The only thing I can think of is that the account, for some reason, is busy. Turning the mac off and on again might solve that. The opposite might also help. Log in as “Standard” and wait for the mac to go to sleep, which might indicate it has finished.
M2 Studio. I’ve edited my original post to include this information.
I’ve turned the Mac on/off, I’ve tried Safe Boot. Fast User Switching from both my regular Admin and the secondary account (originally Standard, now Admin) show all users.
When logged into my regular Admin account, I cannot see the secondary Admin account from Users & Groups.
When logged into the secondary Admin account, I cannot see the primary Admin account from Users & Groups.
I am aware of some terminal commands that will probably work to downgrade from Admin to Standard account – but want to understand why this is happening before I do so.
Is there any chance that the two accounts share the same uid, i.e., are actually the same account? From the Terminal.app command line, try id <username> for each.
macOS used to expose username aliases in the Users & Groups preference pane, but it looks like aliases are hidden in Sequoia. I’m sure there are ways to do it on the command line, but you might try looking at each account in the Directory Editor panel of the Directory Utility.app at
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Directory\ Utility.app
Of course, use all necessary caution when poking around in Directory Utility.
If nothing obvious jumps out, I’d try contacting Apple Support. It is an interesting situation!
No–they are separate accounts with different UID (501 & 504). The Standard account is quite old having created it years ago to test things in a plain vanilla account. I wanted to test something yesterday in that “clean” account but as an Admin so upgraded it. Now I cannot downgrade it to Standard because it no longer shows up in Users & Groups.
Directory Utility reports the same information–different UIDs.
This article shows a method using Terminal to reset it to a Standard account. Scroll down in the article to “Using Terminal Commands.”
Thanks.
Users & Groups failed to change an Admin account to Standard because it was not shown as an account. The account exists and I can log in to it.
Next I tried using command line but it also failed.
“sudo dscl . -delete /Groups/admin GroupMembership username”
Finally resorted to Directory Utility. That allowed me to delete the account.
So, fixed…