keychain not working, resetting does not help

Thank you for taking a look.

>Repair Keychain in El Capitan or Sierra

I did that. This was different because step 6 was to add a new keychain instead of Add keychain. Did that, created a new password (the login password wasn't strong enough) and rebooted. After logging in it asked for the keychain password, so i changed the password there back to the user password. Anyway, after logging in, testing via wifi again came with the same error. So, i added one of the old keychains again and rebooted, no help there either. 😟

>Keychain Access in El Capitan

String does not seem to exist.

>Tutorial: Resolving Keychain Issues

Verified all four checkbox were ticked. Did the repair (in the past, both verify and repair said all was good). It apparently had what to do!

Rebooted. Messages asks for password access. That works.

Wifi produces same error. I checked, and as suspected, i have two login keychains. Deleted both with references and files. Then i went into backup (all files in the keychain folder were from tries to fix this), copied login-old.keychain to ~/Library/Keychains (that's one directory up from where it was in backup) renamed it to login.keychain, added it via File->Add keychain, unlocked it, verified all four options were checked for first aid (just as they were before, but why not double check), clicked repair, no problems found.

Rebooted, messages did not popup this time asking for access, tested wifi, same error. 😟

>The second option is to completely delete your keychain then recreate it.

Deleted login keychain with references and files, added keychain, this time when it complained about the weak password, i just clicked ok again and it went through on the second try. Make Keychain "login" Default is greyed out.

Rebooted, wifi produces the same error.

>Login as root and perform repair

Enabled root user. logged out, logged in as root, chose "Don't sign in" and Skip, went through Setting up your mac screen. Keychain access, made sure all four options were ticked, Repair, no problems found:

Deleted the keychain with references and files. Went to library keychain, there was no login.keychain, just the directory:

File->New Keychain, named it login, which now appears in the directory:

Verified the keychain and repaired it, just because:

tried wifi, same error. rebooted, logged in as root, same error. Disabled root user, logged back in as user. Same error.

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So, this error happens as root, so its not just a problem with this user's file. Further, it is a weird error that the keychain cannot be found and the reset screen does not allow any input.

I decided to try something myself. I deleted the login keychain with references and files, and tried wifi again (maybe it is trying to create a login keychain when one is already there, hence the error?) no such luck. So, i copied the backup again as before and unlocked it.

Any more ideas? Something seems really messed up here.

Booted into safemode, same issue. Booted into single user mode and copied /var/db/SystemKey and /Library/Keychains/System.key from another system. That did not work either. Though, i assume the files from single user mode are different.

Also tried: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538 to no avail. 😟

Here's someone with the same issue. Bottom reply did not work for me, and now i have two keychains named system. :/ Though, i do not know where the file for the first one is.

Some more bumbling and jumbling trying the same solutions with systemkeychain, i added -v (verbose) and got the message: "warning this keychain cannot be unlocked with any passphrase" which comes from the source code right after it says "// generate a random key". Makes sense. It generated a key for me and laughed. But, there does not seem to be an option for adding a passphrase according to the man page. So, i added the -s and -t options (making the entire command: sudo systemkeychain -C -f -s -t -v) to which it responds that system unlock is not working.

I tried other things too. The same error still shows up, but i can hit ok to the reset to defaults dialog and opera and safari run without error now. So, it's not perfect, but odd.