Mac Book suddenly stopped recognising my password + touchID malfunction

After the last update my macbook suddenly started giving errors when I input my usual password, in addition to that touchID has become slower and barely usable.

I tried removing my fingerprints and the process got unbearably imprecise requiring me to start over and over again (I spent 30 minutes trying to re-add my fingerprints).

I tried rebooting in safe mode, nothing.

I even tried to reset my macbook password (losing all the keychain entries in the process and having to login again to a bunch of services 😡 ) but after a couple of days it started not recognising my password again.

I hope there's a solution to this because it's frustrating and dangerous as this is a work computer and I'm constantly risking to remain locked out.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Feb 27, 2025 5:33 AM

Reply
3 replies
Sort By: 

Feb 27, 2025 5:39 AM in response to jarifromappignano

Get a current backup, if you can.


Reset and reinstall and restore.


Here are the articles for the general sequence starting with erasing, booting Recovery on your particular Mac, and restoring your backups:



Then failing that, contact Apple Support, as it would appear either low-level firmware is corrupt, or part of your hardware is failing.

Reply

Feb 27, 2025 7:14 AM in response to jarifromappignano

Only way to mark data as valuable is with backups, and those backups have to happen before the crash, corruption, failure, fire, dunk…. Too many of us unfortunately get to learn that the hard way too, by losing our data.


And partitioning is one of the ways to corrupt data — it’s why I usually pick guests and a virtual machine, and not native boot from partitioning. It’s harder to damage the install from a guest.


Try Target Disk Mode: Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode - Apple Support


Data recovery is another option, though that won’t be cheap.


Other potential options here (those that modify the storage contents, such as trying to reinstall macOS atop itself) can cause more data to be lost, if this is a corruption.

Reply

Mac Book suddenly stopped recognising my password + touchID malfunction

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.