Can not login to main user account after moving home folder to RAID direct attached storage via Users

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Level 1

6 points

Can not login to main user account after moving home folder to RAID direct attached storage via Users

Setup: Mac Pro 2013 with OSX 10.9.2 and a LaCie 5Big setup in RAID 10. There are two user accounts: Account A is an admin account. Account B is my main account set up as a standard user.

Probable cause: In the Users & Groups Advanced Preference pane I moved the home folder for Account B to the LaCie drive.

Problem: When I restart the machine I get the following error.

I have to log into Account A and then I can change users to my normal account. After changing users my desktop picture has changed, but I think that has something to do with changing spaces.

Thanks in advanced for any help you can offer.

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Mar 11, 2014 1:46 PM

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Answer 1

macbig

Level 4

1,680 points

Mar 11, 2014 3:41 PM in response to mark00thomas

User accounts should reside on the same drive as the System files. Why would you move it?

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Answer 2

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 13, 2014 9:49 AM in response to macbig

macbig, please tell me you are kidding ...

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Answer 3

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 13, 2014 9:52 AM in response to mark00thomas

Update: Apple suport's recomendation did not work. I have been using the root of the external drive (/all my stuff) vs their recomendation that I should be using a home folder on the drive named the same as my user account (/home folder/all my stuff).

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Answer 4

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 17, 2014 11:49 AM in response to mark00thomas

They are looking at the diagnostic reports and are going to get back to me. The Disk Image their softwear gathers is very informative. I'll post the fix when I get it.

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Answer 5

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 19, 2014 6:43 PM in response to mark00thomas

Here is the information that apple's enginiers came back with:

Thank you for your escalation. It is likely that this login issue is occurring because the only volume that mounts before users login is the OS X startup disk, so the external disk containing the home folder would not be mounted at the point when the user first starts to login.

Moving a home folder to a volume other than the startup disk is a configuration that may not work as expected in all cases, and we currently have no official documentation explaining how to do this. The customer may be able to find steps to move their home folder to another disk, on a third-party web site or discussion board, but AppleCare consumer-level support does not currently provide support on this configuration (documented in section 3 under the heading "Home folder location" in procedure documents CP1393, CP1385, CP1266, and CP1080).

You can suggest the the customer use the external drive to store large files or use it as Time Machine backup. The customer can move their iTunes media and/or iPhoto library (both commonly use a large amount of disk space) from their home folder on the startup disk to the external drive, with the steps in these KBase articles:

iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449

iPhoto: How to move the Library folder to a new location

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229

Obesrvations:

1. This doesn't answer the real question of why this doesn't work and the best practice to fix it.

2. I have been told many times that "the users home folder contains nothing nessary for the system to boot and the user to log in." I think however that this is false or at best misleading. I think the answer may have to do with the security process and the keychain stored in the Library of the user folder to decrypt the disk.

3. Because I am not wasting anymore time on this, I am going back to my old practice of making symbolic links to the external drive and leaving the home folder on the startup disk.

4. articles like one http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/relocate-your-home-folder-to-another-dri ve-or-volume--mac-48822 only work until you delete the home folder. As you can see in his tip, he never trieds to restart after deleting the home folder.

5. This method only works if you are moving the folder to another place on the drive you are booting from. A diffrent partition on the same disk is fine, but no a diffrent disk.

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Answer 6

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 22, 2014 2:42 PM in response to mark00thomas

Well, to show my @$$ a little ... as someone who owns every one of your products and has purchased everone of your major releases for a decade now, I think this is a ****** answer from the wealthist company in the world to a coustomer who just purchased a $5,000 computer and a $2,000 LaCie drive from you.

"Sir, don't use your computer the way you would like too, only use it in one of these overly simplistic ways."

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Answer 7

macbig

Level 4

1,680 points

Mar 22, 2014 4:31 PM in response to mark00thomas

Ooops! I really wasn't kidding.

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Answer 8

Mar 24, 2014 8:31 AM in response to mark00thomas

In theory you should be able to relocate your home directory to an external drive. As you have found Apple does provide a means to reconfigure your home directory location in the Advanced options for user accounts.

Some external drives however take too long to 'mount' for them to be available when needed after booting and when you are trying to login, this would be especially the case if you are trying to have it automatically login as a user instead of asking you for the name and password.

Some external drives will be designed to only power up when asked for data, this can be one of the possible causes of them not being available in time, see if there are any options to turn such a feature of perhaps via dip-switches or a software utility. Apple have their own built-in function in Energy-saver settings for "Put hard disks to sleep if possible" and you could try turning that off as well.

You mentioned you have a Lacie 5big configured in a RAID setup. Lacie have stopped shipping hardware RAID solutions for most of their drives including as far as I can see this model, and you have to use Apple's software RAID instead. Apple's software RAID does support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and JBOD. However as drivers have to be loaded during the boot phase to understand and support the software RAID this also can slow down the mounting of an external drive.

I personall avoid all Lacie's so-called RAID solutions now because they are not hardware RAID. For future possible alternatives look at the following.

Western Digital - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=630

Promise - http://www.promise.com/promotion_page/promotion_page.aspx?region=en-global&rsn=1 00

To summarise the suggestions.

Turn of Apple's energy saver setting to sleep drives
See if Lacie have a similar feature and also turn it off
Boot with no-auto-login, then wait a minute before trying to login, this may give the drive enough time to mount

One other thing to check that I have just remembered. Some external drives may initially be configured not to support user permissions for files. This would not affect the speed of mounting but certainly for storing home directories is a 'bad thing'. You can check this by clicking on the mounted drive in the Finder then selecting Get Info. In the Get Info window should be an option at the bottom for "Ignore ownership on this volume". You do not want this ticked.

PS. The home directory does not contain anything necessary for the machine to boot, however it does contain things necessary for the user to login. Normally a 'new' user logging in for the first time will cause the creation of a new home directory in which all the needed settings and temporary files will be stored. In this case even if one considered the scenario of having defined the user to be stored on the external drive and it was initially empty, if it was not present there would be noware to create the files and folders for the user account. If the user home directory has been previously created but the home directory cannot be found because the drive is not yet mounted then it will try and create a new home directory but fail because the location to do it - the external drive is not available.

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Answer 9

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 24, 2014 11:01 AM in response to John Lockwood

Hey John,

Thanks for the post and effort to help. As you can see I got a little worked up over this issue. It has by far the longest process/fix I have ever had to do with a Mac since 2003 ish.

In response to some of your comments and where I'm at now.

John Lockwood wrote:

... Some external drives however take too long to 'mount' for them to be available when needed after booting and when you are trying to login, this would be especially the case if you are trying to have it automatically login as a user instead of asking you for the name and password....

After everything I have done to restore the functionality of my set up (decrypt both volumes, reinstall OSX and use symlinks for 14 huge folders). I have a mounting problem. Apple doesn't support using file vault to encrypt RAID setups so I used the command line to create a Logical Volume and then encrypted it similar to file vault, However after I decrypted the Logical Volume, every time it powers on, it will not mount because it is locked. It doesn't appear anywhere except for disk utility. In disk utility I first must try to mount it and that fails and I am then able to right click and unlock the logical volume. It does not prompt me for a password.

I am mostly fine with things the say the are now, but I would like this drive to auto-mount, and be encrypted.

I personally avoid all Lacie's so-called RAID solutions now because they are not hardware RAID. For future possible alternatives look at the following.

I am not a RAID expert, but I think the soft wear RAID is a good solution because if the Pegasus 2 hard wear failed I hear that your data on the drives is all lost unless you can get the same exact chipset to read the drives (that is hearsay).

I actually bought the Pegasus2 and returned it because the, drives were low quality, and not enterprise quality drives like the price tag suggested. One of them failed the first week. Also the manual was poorly written with many typos and grammatical errors so much so that I started questioning the whole product. I returned it for the Big5. Thinking back on it the Pegasus2 R6 was faster, and gave me a much smaller headache.

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Answer 10

Mar 24, 2014 1:05 PM in response to mark00thomas

If you are trying to run FileVault on top of software RAID then this as you admit not supported. This would certainly interfere with trying to access a user home directory stored on it.

The password for the FileVault encrypted external drive is normally stored in the users keychain, which is of course on the encrypted drive. You will not be able to get access to a keychain of any user until you login. This may explain why you can only access the drive after you first login as the admin account, then logout and then be able to relogin as your normal account.

You may ask how does FileVault encryption of a boot drive work if the password is in the user keychain? This works because in this case FileVault stores the password in the Recovery partition and stores it with a special copy of the users login password, if you enter the correct login password it retrieves the FileVault key and continues the boot process. However a Software RAID volume cannot have a Recovery partition on it. In your case the internal drive will not be part of a software RAID so your ok on that front.

So it seems your use of FileVault is the problem.

Either accept the inconvenience of having to first login as the admin account, or
Get a hardware RAID solution, or
don't use FileVault on the external drive

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Answer 11

mark00thomas Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 24, 2014 3:21 PM in response to John Lockwood

I'm not using FileVault, but I need to use it or some type of encryption. It is just in a logical volume like FileVault does. I how that would pretty well from a friends paper. I'm only going to leave that resourse in my dropbox for a day or so.

I think that problem is that they RAID is still formated as a logical volume, but not encrypted. Here is the output from

diskutil cs list

Logical Volume Group 32F717F9-8D00-4DD6-81AE-E23CCD24DB00

=========================================================

Name: D2D.Storage.LaCie.RAID

Status: Online

Size: 8000885489664 B (8.0 TB)

Free Space: 0 B (0 B)

|

+-< Physical Volume 3008E753-530E-4CA3-87A2-55C7C827C4B4

| ----------------------------------------------------

| Index: 0

| Disk: disk6

| Status: Online

| Size: 8000885489664 B (8.0 TB)

|

+-> Logical Volume Family 240C1DCB-7774-4516-8CDB-9F9851DB6650

----------------------------------------------------------

Encryption Status: Unlocked

Encryption Type: None

Conversion Status: Converting

Conversion Direction: backward

Has Encrypted Extents: Yes

Fully Secure: No

Passphrase Required: No

|

+-> Logical Volume 81DFD89E-0845-4A53-8BCB-0495476664DB

---------------------------------------------------

Disk: disk8

Status: Online

Size (Total): 8000549937152 B (8.0 TB)

Conversion Progress: 86%

Revertible: No

LV Name: D2D.Storage.LaCie.RAID

Volume Name: D2D.Storage.LaCie.RAID

Content Hint: Apple_HFS

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