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Remove user account and archive as disk image error

Hi guys, I'm having some troubles removing a user from a MacBook running 10.6.6. I want to remove the user and archive their home folder as a disk image (in case I ever need to get access to some of their files in the future). I know it's a fairly straightforward process, I've done it before. I log in as admin, go to system preferences, accounts and then select the account and press the "-" button to remove it. I select the "Save home folder in a disk image" option, and click okay, but all I get is the following error message -

"Unable to delete the user account xxxxx

An error occurred while backing up the user's home folder."


No details as to the error, but the console logs give me this info:

7/02/11 5:28:46 PM [0x0-0x52052].com.apple.systempreferences[756]
2011-02-07 17:28:46.418 writeconfig[763:903] DIHLDiskImageCreate failed: 999 (options:{


I've done this many times before, without a hitch - this one is really giving me grief, so any help would be appreciated.


Cheers,
Matt

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Posted on Feb 6, 2011 10:33 PM

Reply
8 replies

Apr 18, 2017 3:31 PM in response to ginganinja13

So I stumbled here because I'm having a lot of hangs when offboarding user accounts form El Capitan and Sierra computers at my office. It turns out manual sudo hdiutil create -srcfolder ~john /Users/Shared/john.dmg is absolutely the way to go except I'm having two issues: the command seems to hang (never finishes) and then if I Control+C the process I get an "Canceling..." that ironically, never cancels.


What's going on? I wonder if the hdiutil issue is related to the fundamental problem the account delete GUI function is having...?

Feb 21, 2011 7:26 AM in response to ericblanding

Does Disk Utility give your hard drive a clean bill of health?

In any case, I wouldn't try to archive a user's data this way anyway. Far too often I have seen disk images fail to mount with the "no mountable filesystems" error, leaving all the data inside of them irretrievable. It's a much better idea to archive the data into a disk image, and then test that the image correctly mounts, before deleting the user account.

This Terminal command will make a disk image of the user john's home folder and save it in /Users/Shared:

sudo hdiutil create -srcfolder ~john /Users/Shared/john.dmg

Remove user account and archive as disk image error

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