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iW00t

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Nov 7, 2006
3,286
0
Defenders of Apple Guild
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.
 
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.

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...
 
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.

Oh, the old account and the new account has no password (blank password), so that is why it is so puzzling.
 
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