Unable to log in - home directory on another partition.

[spinnerlys]

Hello.

My MBPs HDD died, so I bought a new one and partitioned it into two volumes.
One for the OS, the other for my home directory.

It ran fine the last few weeks, only once (or maybe twice) I was unable to login, but entering the password again seemed to help.

I restarted today, and again, I can't login.

I ran Single User Mode and /sbin/fsck -fy , also started up in Verbose Mode and also used Target Disk Mode and repaired both volumes with my iBook's Disk Utility.


Nothing seems to help.

I'm currently at work, and don't have my Leopard DVDs with me, it's quite a way home and raining in the dark.

I don't have another user to use for logging in. Could I somehow enable the "root" user?

Or is there even a way with Install DVDs? I think I take a taxi home now, to fetch them, as I need that computer for work, need to convert a lot of videos.

Does anyone of you know a way, to solve that issue?

Thanks for reading.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

Typical Apple, not telling you what the error actually is.

Do you have Filevault on?

Resetting the password may work, if it's a password issue.

 

[spinnerlys]

No FileVault, and I didn't reset the password, even though I got the DVDs from home now.

I repaired permissions on the Mac OS volume, but that didn't help either.

I then re-installed Mac OS and will see if it works again.

I have to say, since Apple has gone Intel, I have reinstalled Mac OS way more than I did before that. Reminds me of my Windows days. But what the heck, installing does only take 30 minutes now, and with the partitions no data is lost, except applications.

Maybe the next time this error occurs I will try the password reset function, and I also create an extra account, with its home directory on the same volume as Mac OS X.

Btw, as I save almost everything except downloads on my Desktop, is there a ways to have the actual Desktop folder on the other partition, but the user on the partition with Mac OS?

 

[jabrowntx]

Have you checked Preference Pane > Accounts > Right Click your username and select "Advanced Options" to make sure that it was still pointing to your "non-standard" home directory location?

 

[spinnerlys]

I would have, but I don't know of a way to log in, even with another account.

Maybe enabling a Root account with the help of the Setup DVDs would have worked, but I didn't come that far. I need the computer, so I had to act a little bit quicker and couldn't wait.

Now it's still updating and I hope I can work soon with this damn machine.

 

[DoFoT9]

hey all, i have a similar problem! but its when logging on from a client computer into osx server!

anybody aware of the problem/fix?