I wrote the other day about my experiences upgrading two iMacs to run Apple’s latest release – OSX Lion. At the time I hadn’t had any major issues and was still in a “honeymoon period” with the new distro.
Unfortunately that all changed the next morning.
While the main machine at home, which I’m currently using, appears to not have any issues with the upgrade, it’s a totally different story with my work desktop.
On arriving in the office on Friday morning I could not login. At first I thought that I’d simply mistyped my password. But I hadn’t.
My login was refused.
After spending several minutes trying every possible password combination (very slowly and carefully) I thought I’d do a bit of online research to see if anyone else had been hit with this issue.
My suspicions were confirmed – there are multiple posts in various forums of other users having the same issue. Post-upgrade they couldn’t login to their Macs either. There also seem to be several other issues related to logging in to other services post-upgrade which suggests that there may be an underlying issue related to how users and permissions were upgraded(?).
There are several potential fixes offered on the Mac user forums, though none of them have worked for me so far. I did, however, find another possible solution on the Thursby software site which suggests that AdmitMac might be causing my issue, though I won’t be able to confirm this until tomorrow morning (fingers crossed!)
In any case, even if the issue is not directly related to AdmitMac in my case, that so many other users have had similar issues is quite worrying.
At the moment I have no plans to upgrade my other machines until I am 100% sure that Apple has resolved this specific issue, because I really don’t need any more expensive paperweights!
So for now I am going to be working on my MacBook Pro ..
UPDATE – I followed the instructions on the Thursby site and it made no difference.
UPDATE 2: I did a reinstall (which took a really long time). I was able to login as one of my “new” users and tried to reset the password for the original user. Logged out in order to log back in and I now can’t login at all again 🙁
So what are my options at this stage?
I’m beginning to think that a completely fresh install might be the only sane option ie. wipe the hard drive completely and start from scratch
UPDATE 3 – I wiped the hard drive and did a completely fresh install of Lion. I’ve no idea how useful the Time Machine backups are going to be, but I’ll be looking at them tomorrow if I can. Due to the way I work most of the really important stuff isn’t stored on the local hard drive anyway, so it’s more of an inconvenience than a “disaster”. On the plus side it means that it’s a nice fresh, clutter free, install 🙂
Related articles
- My First Day With Mac OSX Lion (wired.com)
- An Extensive Guide On Upgrading To OSX Lion & Making Installation Disks [Mac] (makeuseof.com)
- Apple launch Mac OSX Lion (independent.co.uk)
- My First Day With Mac OSX Lion (GeekDad Weekly Rewind) (wired.com)
- The Lion Roars: Mac OSX 10.7 – the Mac cat’s new features (gizmag.com)
I know exactly how you feel mate.
I used to have similar problems on my Windows machines about ten years ago.
Kevin
Hopefully (fingers crossed) I’ll be able to resolve this stupid issue in the next couple of days .. though a complete reinstall might be on the cards (*shudder*)
Michele
Did you verify your hard drive and repair permissions Disk Utility before upgrading?
Do you have any system hacks installed? AdmitMac?
James
I have got AdmitMac installed (I think) so I’m hoping that the instructions on their site will help ..
As for verifying the drive etc., I didn’t do that on either machine, but only one of them is having issues.
Michele
“Thursby software site which suggests that AdmitMac might be causing my issue… I have no plans to upgrade my other machines until I am 100% sure that Apple has resolved this specific issue”.
If the problem is caused by AdmitMac, why should Apple resolve the issue?
Should have verified the disk structure on both and repaired permissions, before doing any upgrade.
Maybe the one having an issue needed repair.
Steve
While my issue *might* be related to 3rd party software it’s clear that a lot of people are having issues with authentication
Michele
I had a similar problem on my macbook;
turns out the keyboard language layout had been switched from english to french for some reason, so when i would type a letter ‘q’ a letter ‘z’ would be typed instead, but i initially couldn’t tell as the password field was blocked out.
I only found out because another user on the same computer had a password that was unaffected by the changes, and logging into their area revealed the problem when doing an internet query on the problem (the words were spelt wrong!)
If you use the multi-language keyboard layout option on your mac for some reason, maybe this happened to you too?
Barry
One of my attempts at fixing the problem was to remove the file /var/db/.AppleSetupDone so on reboot the machine confirms your language preferences ..
Thanks anyway 🙂
Michele
I believe this Apple bug is pretty general. I had it on my MacBook, iMac and MacMini.
The solution was to boot holding down the option key to the repair area, pull up a terminal window and do a resetpassword command for root.
From there, after rebooting and loggin in as sys admin, was able to recreate my missing accounts.
Simon
Tried that – didn’t work 🙁
Regards
Michele