User's Home Folder on External Disk broken on 13.3?

[foonon]

My home directory is on an external disk on my 2019 Mac Pro.

I just upgraded to Ventura 13.3, and I cannot login. I get a spinning wheel of death below my name and avatar.

I can ssh to the system and login as myself, but "sudo su -" also hangs.

Logging in as a user on the internal disk works. I can also create a new user and move the home directory to the external disk and that works, too.

Any help or pointers to help appreciated.

Is it possible to revert the upgrade?

~f

 

[zama36]

I'm having issues with external drives after upgrading to 13.3. For whatever reason the disk just get ejected. I'm betting you're having a similar issue but can't see it getting ejected since you are trying to log in. I've been in contact with Apple Support and they need more people to report it to get it to engineering.

I have experienced this issue of portable disks being ejected under all of the following circumstances.

• Updated 13.3 in normal mode.
• Updated 13.3 in safe mode.
• Reinstalled 13.3 in normal mode.
• Reinstalled 13.3 in safe mode.

Only option now for me is to restore OS using a Time Machine backup to get back to 13.2. Hopefully it will work.

 

[kitKAC]

My home directory is on an external disk on my 2019 Mac Pro.

I just upgraded to Ventura 13.3, and I cannot login. I get a spinning wheel of death below my name and avatar.

I can ssh to the system and login as myself, but "sudo su -" also hangs.

Logging in as a user on the internal disk works. I can also create a new user and move the home directory to the external disk and that works, too.

Any help or pointers to help appreciated.

Is it possible to revert the upgrade?

~f

Since you can create new users and move them to the external disk, you could try recreating your account.

Login as an Admin account and delete your existing account (but obvs not the Home folder).
Recreate the account and point it back to the one on the External drive.
Fix the Home folder permissions via Terminal with "sudo chown -vR [YourAccountName] [PathToHomeFolder]"

Actually, you could try fixing the existing Home folder permissions first using the "chown" command and see if that helps?

 

[kitKAC]

I'm having issues with external drives after upgrading to 13.3. For whatever reason the disk just get ejected. I'm betting you're having a similar issue but can't see it getting ejected since you are trying to log in. I've been in contact with Apple Support and they need more people to report it to get it to engineering.

I have experienced this issue of portable disks being ejected under all of the following circumstances.

• Updated 13.3 in normal mode.
• Updated 13.3 in safe mode.
• Reinstalled 13.3 in normal mode.
• Reinstalled 13.3 in safe mode.

Only option now for me is to restore OS using a Time Machine backup to get back to 13.2. Hopefully it will work.

OP said that they could create new accounts and move them to the External drive, so it's not being disconnected.

 

[foonon]

As previously mentioned, the external drive is not being disconnected.

It seems like a CoreServices process called "UserAccountUpdater" is hanging when I login to a previously existing external drive account for the first time after upgrading.

 

[gadgetware]

I am having this same issue. I actually had a similar issue when I updated to Ventura the first time (it didn't seem to like a space in the name of the external drive) My machine (mac mini M1) wouldn't boot after the update. Once I disconnected the external drive it would boot and I could log in as the admin which has a home folder on the internal drive. Here are a couple of things I've found:

1. My external ssd's mount point name had changed from "ssd_data" to "ssd_data 1". Seems like there was a ghost directory called ssd_data in my /Volumes directory. I deleted the ghost directory and rebooted and then the drive mounted again as "ssd_data". I repointed my home directory to the proper place but it still hangs if I try to boot with the external drive attached (note: I have it set to autolog in to my main user account).

2. All of the permissions of the files on my external drive are now "admin" instead of the user account. I have tried to user the chown command (sudo chown user /filepath), and after the command runs it is still set to admin.

3. Tried to delete the user account, recreate and point it to the external SSD. Will boot fine (so I think the auto-login was crashing it before), but when I try to log in as that user it just spins.

Hate to think that I am going to have to reinstall over this.

 

[michaelrommel]

Same issue here.

1. It seems, that at the time of login, the external drives are no longer mounted at all. (Verified this, by logging in via ssh as that user, who has the homedir on the external drive. It logged me in with home as / and the /Volumes directory did not show the external drive.

2. When logging in as the other admin on the GUI, the external drive was mounted and all files were shown as owned by that user!

3. I could only open a terminal, sudo to elevated privileges, rsync all files of the external user to the internal /Users drive, chown -R user:staff to the home dir and change the users homedirectory to the /Users location instead of the external drive.

I therefore do not think, that a new installation will help. If Apple changed the mounting of external drives to this ****** behaviour, I do not think anything can be done!

 

[gadgetware]

Not sure if it's a mounting problem. I created a new user directory on my external drive and was able to log in when I pointed the user to that drive. Then I started moving my files over to that new directory. Seems to be something in the Library (hidden) directory that's hanging things up.

 

[jlg89]

Workaround:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/124fods/comment/je9yt8u/

 

[sssandess]

This is a bad issue. My users's home directories are on a RAID 1, and this issue also appears to have reformatted two independent drives in my RAID bay as "spare", causing total data loss on these disks (aside from the independent backups). All simply by upgrading to macOS 13.3 and attempting to log in.

I confirm that disabling SIP provides a workaround.

Please file bug report to Apple via the Feedback Assistant. Here's my report:

User Home Folder on External Disk Broken on 13.3

After upgrading to macOS 13.3, users with Home Directories on an external hard drive are unable to login.

Login attempts yield an endlessly spinning pinwheel.

Furthermore, my external hard drive is on a 4 disk RAID with 2 disks configured as RAID 1 (user home directories) and 2 disks independent. After upgrading to macOS 13.3 and attempting to login as a user on the external RAID 1, the 2 independent disks were added to the RAID and shown by `diskutil ar list` as Apple_RAID “spare” devices, causing total data loss on these two disks. I did not reconfigure these disks and did nothing but upgrade to macOS 13.3 and attempt to login.

The workaround that addresses this issue, perhaps only temporarily, is to turn off SIP with `csrutil disable` in Recovery Mode, then login to all accounts and access the Apple ID in System Preferences for each account.

This issue is widely reported on the internet, and several people have encountered it.

References:
* https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/users-home-folder-on-external-disk-broken-on-13-3.2385615/
*

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/124fods/_/je9yt8u

 

[foonon]

This is a bad issue. My users's home directories are on a RAID 1, and this issue also appears to have reformatted two independent drives in my RAID bay as "spare", causing total data loss on these disks (aside from the independent backups). All simply by upgrading to macOS 13.3 and attempting to log in.

I confirm that disabling SIP provides a workaround.

Please file bug report to Apple via the Feedback Assistant. Here's my report:

I just ran into a snag after re-enabling SIP.


I have a gmail email account (IMAP) in the Mail app that was working perfectly well after step 7 in the work-around from the Reddit post. When I re-enabled SIP, it was offline. Nothing would bring it back (incl, restart the app, restart the system, & restart in safe mode) and there were no error messages or prompts to set the password or anything. After disabling SIP again, the mail account was online immediately.

 

[foonon]

My home directory is on an external disk on my 2019 Mac Pro.

I just upgraded to Ventura 13.3, and I cannot login. I get a spinning wheel of death below my name and avatar.

I can ssh to the system and login as myself, but "sudo su -" also hangs.

Logging in as a user on the internal disk works. I can also create a new user and move the home directory to the external disk and that works, too.

Any help or pointers to help appreciated.

Is it possible to revert the upgrade?

~f

It has been reported that this has been fixed in 13.3.1

Update: Mac Home directory bug fixed with macOS Ventura 13.3.1

The System Integrity Protection affects setups that store Home directories on external drives.

www.macworld.com

~f

 

[Socrates121]

This occurred to me after the last few OS X updates on a Mac Mini 2018. In all cases the problem results from log files getting stored on the system disk in a directory under "/Volumes/-Ext-Disk-Name-/". Which resulted in the disk, after the update, getting mounted at a different mount point "/Volumes/-Ext-Disk-Name 1/" (since directory already existed for desired mount point).
Was able to resolve the issue by logging in to admin account on system disk and deleting the log files and directories on the system disk, rooted in my disk name. This did require using 'sudo rm -idr' ... be sure to get the files (there were only 6 real log files buried under several levels of directories) under the correct directory (not the "... 1" directory). Then rebooting, which allowed the external disk to mount at the expected point and allowed me to log in to that user's account.

 

[Socrates121]

PS: I wonder if this may have started when I started the update/upgrades from the user account on the external disk ... would be interesting to know if this occurs when updates are started and run from an account rooted on the system disk (not an external disk).