Unable to login with user folder on external drive since 12.5.1 upgrade

My comment was intended only to add to the information available to those who read this thread. Everything we all have done shows what does not fix this problem. I spent a long time over several days with fairly high level Apple tech support. Nothing Apple suggested helped, and they know it. This morning I ran a system diagnostic as I tried the log in that does not work, and submitted that as part of a Feedback Assistant report. Hopefully, with enough data, Apple will fix this.

Meanwhile, everything seems to work well, except for the inconvenience of having to log in twice.

Interesting find. I had found something similar: After the 12.5.1 update, instead of being logged into my main (external) user account -as it is usually the case after such point updates- the system booted with a "full" start up, showing the log in screen. I then logged into my usual (external administrative) user account and was presented with a default macOS Finder and the set up routine, that is usually shown after a clean System installation or on a first boot on a completely new Mac.

First impression was that the link to the external Home Folder was reset in System Preferences and macOS created a fresh Home Folder for this user on the internal ssd.

In System Preferences I’ve found the set up for the external Home Folder was still there, but it was set to a Volume „xyz 1“ (instead of just „xyz“). Correcting this to „xyz“ did not help, direct login remained faulty and in System Preferences the Home Folder path was again reset to „xyz 1“.

Disk Utility does not show this „new“ Volume on the higher levels, but if I select the (normal) Volume within the Container disk, it shows the „xyz 1“ Volume as Mount-Point. (And of course, this one also appears in Terminal).

No Onyx routine helped so far and I now recently stumbled over a thread which indicates, that Symbolic Links probably create issues at least on localised macOS versions: one user reported that the „outsourced“ folders are restored as empty new folders on the (internal) startup disk with their english names after each system boot. This started with Catalina and obviously leads to muddled data on internal and external volumes.

It is probably too optimistic to assume that Apple worked on the handling of SymLinks on localised macOS versions lately. Haven’t found informations so far whether US-versions of macOS are also affected, so it might work there as expected. (It also might work on localised systems if one uses the US-engl. file names, but that's just personal guesswork).

Probably, 12.5.1 contained some changes for APFS, who knows. And it seems we will spend some more time with this issue…

I am in the US, the problem is here. Even though I am not so CLI-proficient, I have seen the issues reported by others above, and that allowing Onyx delete caches does not help. I have two weird observations to add.

When the issue first appeared, a new alias pointing to the disk where my user spaces are located also appeared. If my memory is correct, I saw this alias in Finder. I looked at System Preferences and saw the Home Directory path looked strange - too long, but I do not remember the details. Thinking I had found the problem, I clicked the Choose button and selected the disk. The new path looked better, but the disk had a number added:

/Volumes/Pegasus R4i 3/Users/ritch

Also, the Aliases box contained a path to Pegasus R4i. I deleted this and the alias disappeared from the Finder.

These changes made no difference. The problem continued.

The second weird observation was that my wife's user space, which is relocated to Pegasus R4i just as my user space is, still works to log in, and has the same path as always, which means without "space digit" appended to Pegasus R4i. Seeing that this path still works for her user space, I tried manually editing the path to my user space. As R.Simon has reported, that does not fix the problem. The weird thing is that path to the relocated directory that has always worked for my wife's user space still works, while what appears to be the same path to my user space now does not work.

I reported this issue including a System Diagnostic captured during a faulty log in attempt via Feedback Assistant on September 15. Now, over a week later, no recent similar reports are noted. I will add a link to this discussion to the report.

One potential variable which I have not seen mentioned is Intel or Apple processor. I have a MacPro7,1 and a MacBookPro18,2. Working in Photos on the same System Library I have seen differences in the user interface. Bugs running on Intel are not present running on Apple Silicon. Since the code has diverged for the two types of processor, the two branches should each be debugged. If the problem we are seeing only affects code running on Intel, and Apple is debugging only, or primarily, on AppleSi, as R.Simon says, we may have this problem for a while.

Oh yes, you're right: this should have been an absolute basic information. For the records, struggling with the issue on a Mac mini 8,1 (Intel i7) and I wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out to be a Mac-Intel only issue.

Now a somewhat unexpected information is that the log-in (assuming during a system boot, not during fast user switching) to your wife's account is not affected and the link to the belonging Home Folder still is the same as it was before the 12.5.1 update (= ext. Volume without a numbering).

An observation that I did not reported so far is that I have an Alias to an Apple idms.appleid web address listed in the extended options of my affected user account in System Preferences. (Unfortunately I cannot remember, if this link was present before 12.5.1 as it has been a while that I had looked into these options).

My other admin account on the internal ssd does not have such a link listed although both accounts share the same Apple ID (as noted, this account is a "fall back" purely for safety reasons).

(Meanwhile I had a brief check with symlinks but log in failed. Will try this solution again, but currently I think about removing the Apple ID link once just to check what happens. This is because I lately reconsidered if the whole issue might be related to the boot process and Apple ID or iCloud… )

Just found this. I had this problem too, with both recent updates of Monterey (12.5.1 and 12.6) but managed to resolve it, both times, in a way that survived reboots. It was a few months ago so the precise sequence of events is a wee bit vague but, in case it is of use, here's what I recall.

Like the OP I have a Mac mini (2018) with a tiny hard drive (120GB), so had moved my home folder to a USB SSD. After applying the 12.5.1 OS update, I could not log back into my account, instead getting the helpful message "You are unable to log in to the user account <my username> at this time. Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."

Luckily I had a separate unused admin account whose home folder was on the main hard drive and was able to log in to that (after using the recovery partition tools to reset the password, as I'd forgotten it).

(If you don't have another admin account, btw, you can create one by deleting a certain file and making your Mac think it's being set up for the first time. See for instance here: https://www.lifewire.com/create-new-admin-account-for-login-issues-2259976)

As that admin, I right-clicked on my account in System Preferences to get Advanced Options and saw that the name of the hard drive in the path to the Home Directory didn't match the one listed in Terminal - it had an extra " 1" at the end, IIRC. So I changed it to match.

This time I was able to log in – but all of my stuff was gone, as the OS had created a new home folder for me, in the wrong place.

Logging in as the spare admin again I was eventually able to see, both in Terminal and Finder, that the external HD was listed twice. I think they had different icons in Finder. In Terminal, using

cd /Volumes

ls -l

I was able to see that the one with the "correct" name (no extra " 1" at the end) was listed next to today's date, and the group "_analyticsusers". Another version had an older date and the extra " 1" and had the group "admin".

After very carefully checking I had chosen the correct one, I unmounted or deleted (sorry, can't remember which, but I think it was deleting) the other. I think I may've had to use the right-click-on-the-user-account thing again as well, to change the path of my home directory back to its original version – but the nub of the issue was that the correct/original mountpoint name for the drive had been taken by the _analyticsusers group, which presumably I wasn't a member of. Getting rid of it and rebooting made everything OK again, and restored the HD to its original mount name (without " 1") – until the 12.6 OS update, when I had to do the latter steps all over again.

As I say, it was a month ago now, and I didn't document the steps at the time, so am a little sketchy on details. So please treat the above with great caution and don't delete anything if you're not sure!

If there's another update and I encounter the problem again, which I think is highly likely given Apple's disregard of any users with non-default set-ups, I'll return try to provide more details, but perhaps the above may offer a clue as to how to deal with the issue in the meanwhile.

Good luck everyone.

Kestrel27, thank you for your valuable input!

Also had done a few checks in Terminal and had found some unusual results, but couldn’t take my courage to actually change/delete or otherwise do something (except the aforementioned attempts).

My „event history“ is very similar to yours and I’d like to add my findings, in hope that it’s helpful for some.

Since the 12.5.1 update I’m also getting 2 Volumes in Terminal for the external ssd: [Volume] and [Volume 1].

ls -l /Volumes

Both contain a Home Folder with the outsourced user account.

ls -l /Volumes/[Volumename]

By listing the contents of these, Terminal writes

for [Volume 1]: (the expected and visual contents)

- Applications (user level)

- Desktop

- Documents

- Downloads

- Library (user level, invisible in Finder)

- Movies

- Music

- Pictures

- Public

(and some folders from Application packages)

for [Volume]

- Desktop

- Documents

- Downloads

- Library (user level)

- iCloud Drive (Archive)

Listing the contents of these mostly gives: total 0.

Except for the Library, which lists over 50 entries. But all these are also listed for [Volume 1/Library].

Another difference for the 2 Volumes:

On the user level, the Home Folder for [Volume 1] is connected with Group „wheel“ whereas [Volume] is connected with Group “staff“.

For the Group Names on the Volume level, I'd say that the external user account is also part of Group „_analyticsusers“.

At least

id -Gn [username]

seems to confirm.

At this time I hope for upcoming 12.6.1.

If that does not finally untangle the issue I’m tempted to go for Kestrel27’s approach.

Thanks again, cheers to everyone and let's hope for a convenient fix for all of us…

Does volume show up as a folder or a drive?

I have seen posts where an external drive, gets lost, and the mount point turned into a folder. subsequent remount of the drive gives it a suffix number and is the actual mount point.

Visually in Finder nothing has ever changed: the external volume still shows up as always as an external volume (even the custom icon remained intact). Also the expected „Volume“ name (without „1“) is shown.

Disk Utility lists the 3 default levels:

- Media

- the APFS Container disk

- the actual APFS Volume

But the Volume level now shows „Volume 1“ as Mount Point (instead of just „Volume“).

Generally I would assume that changing the Mount Point back to „Volume“ could probably fix the issue, but my Unix skills are more on the „lowest level“, so I would prefer to have it fixed by Apple.

Of course, this might change if 12.6.1 will not fix the issue, but otherwise and as it will probably remain a recurring failure, I’d like to keep the efforts not too expensive for now.

Visually in Finder nothing has ever changed: the external volume still shows up as always as an external volume (even the custom icon remained intact). Also the expected „Volume“ name (without „1“) is shown.

I don't think I explained where to look. Use Go To Folder… in Finder and enter /Volumes.

Are the two volumes there? If so, Get Info on each. Does one of them show the Kind as folder?

@Barney-15E

My bad. Haven't thought about the "Go to" Menu…

You are right: that way, both Volumes are shown, both with name [Volume] (no numbering).

(The contents are as I noted above).

One is a Volume (Volume 1 in Terminal), one is a folder (Volume in Terminal).

The Volume is what can be seen in Finder, it holds the User Home Folder with the expected (pre 12.5.1 update) content.

The "Folder version" also contains a User Folder (default folder icon, no macOS Home Folder icon) with Desktop, Documents, Downloads and iCloud (Archive) (all with Default Folder icons).

All of these are empty, except Desktop, which hold aliases to Guest and Shared on the internal ssd.

Folder Info lists over 300 MB for the Folder and also for the containing User Folder, but the visible folders within this User Folder are just a few KB. (Haven't searched for any invisible content, will do tomorrow).

Might it be possible to just rename the Volume, restart, boot into the Admin on the internal ssd, switch User Home Directory for the outsourced user back to Volume, reboot and then the direct log in to the external user might be possible?

(But first I need to clarify what's all about with these 300+ MB).

@Tom Rich

Interesting find! Thank you for the link.

The description is a bit unclear to me though, as I don't quite understand what he means with that indicated difference between "admin privileges" and "Admin".

In my case, both User Accounts -the "fall-back" account on the internal and my User Account on the external ssd are "Admin" accounts, as I the usage of an "Admin" account and a "Standard User" account (which was a recommended set-up for safety reasons in the earlier days of OSX) is no longer needed nowadays.

But in general, it seems to be our actual issue and what billcody names as FILE is actually the Folder with the Volume name…

raederlandree wrote:

Also, for everyone's benefit, even yours Tom, I submitted a bug report to product feedback, per R.Simon's suggestion. I asked Apple to respond to this thread with their feedback.

It is highly unlikely Apple will respond here or anywhere.

Might it be possible to just rename the Volume, restart, boot into the Admin on the internal ssd, switch User Home Directory for the outsourced user back to Volume, reboot and then the direct log in to the external user might be possible?

(But first I need to clarify what's all about with these 300+ MB).

That seems reasonable. I don’t know where to look for the missing data.