In short: my MBP has locked me out. Every time I try to log in it tells me ‘you are unable to log in to the user account… At this time’
I’m freaking out.
A friend of mine threw a beer across the room and it bumped my MBP on the corner (I should add that I’m not drunk haha) . It was on at the time, no visible damage, carried on working fine. Then a bit later my browser crashed, force quit programs was just giving me a pinwheel so I did a hard reboot. I’ve been locked out since.
I have a nasty feeling it’s something to do with the HDD in my optibay. It has my whole home folder on it (which I assume contains library files relating to login??) and the beer hit right above it. I tried to go in and have a look but all I’ve managed to do is fuck the head up on one of the screws holding the caddy in and I simply don’t have the tools to take it out. My best guess is that maybe either the HDD is damaged or it’s become detached from the optibay, does anyone have any other ideas?
I’m worried about taking this to the genius bar since obviously the optibay isn’t an apple thing, but at the same time I don’t want to brick my laptop. PLEASE HELP ME!!!
Update: opened disk utility from the repair partition and did a repair on the HDD. It appears and doesn’t show any problems when running the repair, but I still can’t log in…
did the beer spill at all? that would of been a catastrophe! wasted beer.. haha
Yeah sounds like you might need to re-seat the connections on your SATA drive. Sometimes random shizz that that happens when it gets a bash or is dropped etc. Failing that maybe check out this forum and see what you can do (not sure if it will help you though)
An yet another update: when I first start disk utility it says the partition on the HDD is ‘not mounted’, but the disk still appears. I’m properly confused and worried right now.
Try booting to the repair partition and run the Password reset utility. Select your user account and repair ACL permissions. Then use the same utility to change your password. Maybe someones screwing with you and changed your user password while you weren’t looking?
I’m not sure how your hard drives are setup, relating to which has boot files and whatnot, but if you’re able to boot into the login screen, usually the problem isn’t hardware related from what i’ve seen.
Ok so I verified the disk, it told me to repair it then said it couldn’t repair it and I need to erase and restore. I have a time machine backup, but since my actual system and apps are on the SSD which is fine, what should I do? If I open time machine from the repair partition and select the HDD, it says ‘the system will be restored onto this disk’. Does that mean it’ll duplicate my whole system onto the HDD? I doubt there’s even space for it.
Is there a way to just erase and restore what was on the HDD?
Problem is since I can’t actually log in I can’t select specific files, only a full restore.
the OS is fine (it’s on the SSD) it’s just the home folder which is missing. I’ve set it going doing a full restore which I imagine will copy both drives onto the HDD. If I delete the erroneous SSD copy, do you think the directory will have any idea where anything is? I really hope there’s space and it doesn’t just run the whole lot then come up with a ‘you need another 5MB’ error at the end.
If you can think of a better option please do let me know, this thing reckons it’ll be running for another 20 hours yet so if there’s a better solution I’d love to give it a crack!
New question, cross posted from the macrumors forum:
[quote]I’ll try and keep this as brief as possible. (tl;dr version: My library folder is on the wrong drive. How can I move it?)
About 18 months ago I switched the HDD in my mid 2009 MBP for an SSD and replaced the optical drive with a larger HDD for storage, which I then moved my home folder onto (though of course not the library folder).
This weekend the HDD got corrupted and I had to do a full erase/restore through time machine, and until I had reformatted the HDD I could not even log in. Once I had erased it I could log in again, but although the old library folder still exists on the boot SSD, it has replaced the (of course now missing until my TM restore is complete) home folder with a new one on the HDD and set up a new default library folder.
I could copy the old library files into the new folder, but I’d prefer to have the library on the SSD, so what I want to know is how would I get OSX to recognise the old library? Or if I just updated the new one, could I move it?
I know moving the library is a bit of a minefield, so I’m hoping one of you can help![/quote]
Thanks for the advice guys, I think I’ve sorted the problem (at least I hope so). I was getting confused by the fact that there’s a difference between the user library and the system library, so now I’ve managed to log in by erasing the HDD and restored the home folder, most things seem back to normal. Strangely I had to hold option while booting to manually select the SSD as the boot drive (even though that’s the only volume with an OS installed on it), but I’ve left it shut down all day while I’m at uni and when I get home I’ll see if that was a one off.
