Unable to login with filevault on Lion

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Unable to login with filevault on Lion

Hello everyone,

First of all, I'd like to mention that I'm an advanced user in computing, so be my guess if you have any suggestion using Terminal commands to solve my specific problem.

Ok, here we go:

My computer has been working relatively fine since Lion's upgrade from Snow Leopard. I have been using Filevault 2 for full disk encryption since the upgrade, and since the upgrade, each time I had to restart the computer, I had trouble login into OS X.

Each single time the login screen appears, I enter my password, and it is accepted. Then the Apple logo appears with the loading wheel. So far, everything is normal.

But sometimes the loading wheel will just keep loading forever and OS X will never open my account. When this happenned, I had to hard shutdown the computer by holding the power button for 4 seconds, then turning it back on by pressing the power button (duh!). After this hard shutdown, the computer will open my account after no more than 10 seconds on this loading wheel screen.

But since today, the computer will not open my user account at all. It's the endless loading wheel to the infinity of times! I've tried multiple hard shutdown, there's nothing to do, it just won't pass that loading screen.

So I know that OS X accepts the password, but for what ever reason, it just won't load the Desktop and everything...

Now I have restarted in Recovery mode using Command+R and I am using the Safari browser to write this message. I've done a couple of search here and on Google, and all that I could find was some log in issue with rejected password or user account missing from the login screen. This is ubviously not the problem I am encountering.

In Recovery Mode, I tried unlocking the encrypted Filevault Macintosh HD drive using the password Filevault 2 asked me to specify when I encrypted the drive, but it just won't accept the **** password. There's only one password I am using and it just doesn't works.

So I can't use my Mac, because I only have one user account and the user session just won't launch, and I can't unlock my drive in recovery mode to repair the permissions, because somehow Filevault would have had mistenkely noted the password.

Fortunately, I do have a Time Machine backup at home that was made yesterday, but unfortunately I am on a business trip for 2 weeks...

I would gladly take any suggestions. And to Steve Jobs, "it just works" MY ***.

My experience with Lion so far is painful, I had wifi issue, dhcp client issue. I'm quite certain that most the these issue would not have happenned if I had installed Lion from a clean install, since all OS upgrade installation are always crap. But the stupid employees at the local Apple Store told me that the AppStore was the only way to get Lion. They never mentionned it'll be available on USB Flash Drive a month later. I would have definately waited if I knew.

What a frustrating situation.

-Phil

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 9, 2011 11:54 AM

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Answer 1

Lion...pain Author

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Aug 9, 2011 1:36 PM in response to Lion...pain

Upon further investigation:

Resetting PRAM does not help.

I booted in Safe-Mode holding Shift. At the login screen, I entered password, it accepted it and went to the loading wheel with the apple logo screen. But there, there was something more, a loading bar at the bottom of the screen. At about 25% of progress, the loading bar vanished with the whole screen and all went light grey screen.

After about 20 seconds, a new login screen appeared, but this time I had to type my username and password, not only my password. It accepted my credentials and started loading, then it seems to have crashed and brought me back to the login screen asking again for my username and password.

Thus led me to beleive that there's something corrupted in my user account.

Since I've no other user account on my computer, Safe Mode is then pretty much useless.

I then booted in single-user mode by holding Command+S. I managed to get to the command prompt and I seems to be logged as root.

I tried to repair permissions, but got a message saying that I cannot use diskutil in single-user mode. That just *****! Everytime I seem to be making progress, I have a new obstacle.

Since I am in single-user mode, the disk as been decrypted by Filevault 2. I was able to run a fsck on Macintosh HD. Of course it did find out errors, and of course, couldn't repair then because the volume is being used.

Now something that will be very helpful, would be to find out how to create a new user account with admin privilege from single-user mode. Thus will finally let me log into a user account to run repair permissions in disk utility and also reset the Filevault password.

OR

If someone knows how to reset filevault disk password from single-user mode, I could finally be able to use disk utility in Recovery Mode.

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Answer 2

Lion...pain Author

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Aug 9, 2011 5:34 PM in response to Lion...pain

I finally managed to set a password to the root account in single user mode, so I could log on into safe mode using different credentials.

At least, that was the plan.

Unfortunately, it seems that the same problem happens, it start to load the Desktop and crash, it gets back on the login screen.

Thus led me to beleive that the whole operating system is corrupted.

So thank you mr Jobs, but your last operating system is a piece of crap.

Will need to wait 2 weeks to get my time machine backups, it better works, otherwise i'm just throwing the balls on Lion and going back to Snow Leopard. There's already too much eye candy for me in Lion, it **** me off, and Lion is more RAM hungry than SL.

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Answer 3

Lion...pain Author

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Aug 24, 2011 12:56 PM in response to Lion...pain

I've just got home and went for a full Time Machine Restore.

Guess what?

Time Machine cannot restore from a network shared folder. But it does let me backup to my Mac mini shared folder.

This is really ridiculous, I will have to transfert the sparsebundle file to an external hard disk, to then restore my Mac...

**** Lion, I'm not transfering 150Go over USB nor Firewire, I'm doing a clean install of Snow Leopard and importing manually every single files settings that I have in my backup.

One advice on Lion: Don't buy this ****! It's a piece of crap, there's not a single improvement worth 30 bucks, everything is going backward, just a bunch of eye candy features that doesn't improve the user experience and productivity at all.

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