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login keychain for account (with blank password) is not blank?

iW00t

iW00t

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Hey guys,

Was trying to fix up a friend's MacBook which had a funny file corruption error that could not be fixed by disk utility, fsck seems to abort during the process of rebuilding the tree all the time and leave the file system in that bad state.

Thankfully we could still accept the /User folders when the computer is connected in TDM and managed to copy out everything in it before we wiped and reinstalled the disk.

Now the thing is when OS X is reinstalled, we could not use the user profile migration wizard, but no worries, we made an account that is just like the old one and copied everything over.

Everything sort of works, except the login.keychain is busted, it prompts us for a password when we never had a password for that account.

What else is there to try? Are we supposed to know some mystery password that was tied to the old installation of OS X?
 
I think that's normal when you manually transfer accounts. The same thing happens if you change an account's short name (properly). Does it accept any sort of password though? Does it go away if you give it a blank password?

On another note, if Disk utility wasn't able to repair the drive earlier then I'm guessing you reformatted before reinstalling. It's unrelated to your Keychain problem, but have you verified the drive again? I'm not so sure I'd be relying on this drive for holding anything important.
 
mad jew said:
I think that's normal when you manually transfer accounts. The same thing happens if you change an account's short name (properly). Does it accept any sort of password though? Does it go away if you give it a blank password?

On another note, if Disk utility wasn't able to repair the drive earlier then I'm guessing you reformatted before reinstalling. It's unrelated to your Keychain problem, but have you verified the drive again? I'm not so sure I'd be relying on this drive for holding anything important.
Click to expand...

It doesn't accept the blank password. We tried it on an account with the same short name on another Mac and it does not work too...
 
mad jew said:
That's weird. Have you tried resetting the password from the OSX discs?
Click to expand...

The old installation was already nuked, so I don't see what good there is to do it from the OSX discs...

We manually copied the home folder over though.
 
iW00t said:
Hmmm... what is wrong with copying the folder manually?
Click to expand...

I think mad jew is trying to say that you've copied the old Keychain to the new account as a side effect of having copied the entire home folder. Try the old password.
 
janey said:
I think mad jew is trying to say that you've copied the old Keychain to the new account as a side effect of having copied the entire home folder. Try the old password.
Click to expand...

Oh, the old account and the new account has no password (blank password), so that is why it is so puzzling.
 
iW00t said:
Oh, the old account and the new account has no password (blank password), so that is why it is so puzzling.
Click to expand...

Have you tried unlocking it with the keychain utility?

(nevermind all the other questions about why there's no password 😱 )
 
janey said:
Have you tried unlocking it with the keychain utility?

(nevermind all the other questions about why there's no password 😱 )
Click to expand...

Yeap, but it asks us for a password (which we never had)...
 
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