Mac Mini only showing me "Reset Password" dialog

[motrek]

Well, this is a pain.

This morning I woke up my Mac Mini and the lock screen hung. Spinning beach ball of death. It happens to me sometimes (once a month?) and a hard reboot fixes it. It's a bummer but oh well.

But this time the boot progress bar was SUPER slow. It got about halfway, stopped, reset itself back to 25% for a while, and now it's showing me a "Reset Password" dialog box with no other UI anywhere.

The options on this dialog box are all no good for me:

- I forgot my password - no I didn't
- My password doesn't work when logging in - don't know, can't get to a login prompt
- My keyboard isn't working ... - it is

Not really sure what to do here. I rebooted into the internet recovery UI, used DiskUtility to mount my boot drive (FileVault password worked fine), used Terminal to tar some important files and ftp them to a server, so at least my important data won't be lost.

But at this point I would like to just be able to log into my computer. The drive seems to be fine, I just can't figure out how to get a login prompt.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[motrek]

Okay, well, I didn't want to do a password reset of anything, but it didn't seem like I had much choice.

I chose the "I forgot my password" option. The UI told me that I didn't have iCloud FileVault recovery set up, so I was out of luck and all I could do was try logging in again. Uh, okay.

Clicking on OK took me straight to the boot screen to enter my FileVault password for my boot drive. Great! I entered the password and startup continued. It quickly got to about 30% done and then the machine rebooted itself. Uh-oh.

But, this time I got back to the same password prompt, entered my password, it worked again, and then the system booted perfectly.

So now I am using my machine again as normal with somewhat less confidence about its reliability.