Doctor X
Registered
I came HERE after getting no help from a Forum Which Will Remain Nameless. My thread got buried by perpetual "How do I upgrade to Leopard?" threads. When I "bumped" it, an Admin removed it, despite the fact a few more threads on the subject were started. None were answered.
HERE? A guy kindly answered the question I had searched the forums, and did not find a thread that directly addressed the issue . . . though I did learn File Vault may not be the smartest thing to engage, or, at the very least, one needs to disable it before updating and . . . archiving and reinstalling!
In the hope this helps someone else . . . here is what happened and how I solved it. There may be an easier way to do it--one probably can do it without wasting disk space making copies, and one might have solved it by just renaming the folder under Disk Utility.
Right . . . to begin, I did something stupid I could not solve. As the tech noted in his response, "you know . . . you could have figured it out if you searched here. . . ." Oh well! Of course I did not do this. I had previously had a problem removing a bad program and had to Archive and Reinstall. I already backed everything up and had File Vault on. It worked fine. No problem.
So I did the same thing . . . having not bothered to back up a few things because I could not figured out "the problem"--which was embarrassingly simple to fix, actually.
Now I could not access my home folder. It existed. It contained "no contents" but it was clear that I had not erased it because I did not lose data on the hard drive. So I tried a number of things.
The Tech--DeltaMac--made a few suggestions. Primarily this had to do with repairing the disk image under Disk Utility. I tried this and figured out what the problem was.
I have a dedicated partition to OS 9 since this is an old machine that had a lot of OS 9 programs. I booted on that and could "look" at the OS 10 partition. This I learned a long time ago is useful if you have a problem with the OS 10 and you have not backed everything up! I can back things up from the OS 9 partition when I have been too dumb to back them up previously.
As above OS 10 I could not see the file vault image--just a file. The file would read as empty. When I tried the Disk Utility idea--I have a TechTool partition with Disk Utility--I could "see" the folder and confirm its size. I could not do anything with it booted on TechTools or Disk Utility. However, as noted below, I saw that the folder had a different name than my usual "user" name. This gave me an idea.
Booted from the OS 9 partition, I could "see" the User folder with unreadable files. I could also confirm the size of the file--~40 gig! I noticed that it had the same title as my normal user name save it added a "." in front of it: "idiot" became ".idiot". I tried the Disk Utility, but it would not read it.
I made a copy of the folder with OS 9, in case my next try screwed up. I then removed the "." from in front of the user name so it had the same name it always did--and is the same as my current OS 10 User in the active System Folder.
Rebooted . . . sacrificed a virgin to the Gods of Data . . . voila!
There was the Disk Image! I could now open it and type in the File Vault password. Opened! It took a while because I had to transfer a few Gigs at a time and empty them from that folder because of limited Disk Space.
I guess it is a "tribute" to encryption, but I am not doing it again!
Hope what I did helps someone else.
--J.D.
HERE? A guy kindly answered the question I had searched the forums, and did not find a thread that directly addressed the issue . . . though I did learn File Vault may not be the smartest thing to engage, or, at the very least, one needs to disable it before updating and . . . archiving and reinstalling!
In the hope this helps someone else . . . here is what happened and how I solved it. There may be an easier way to do it--one probably can do it without wasting disk space making copies, and one might have solved it by just renaming the folder under Disk Utility.
Right . . . to begin, I did something stupid I could not solve. As the tech noted in his response, "you know . . . you could have figured it out if you searched here. . . ." Oh well! Of course I did not do this. I had previously had a problem removing a bad program and had to Archive and Reinstall. I already backed everything up and had File Vault on. It worked fine. No problem.
So I did the same thing . . . having not bothered to back up a few things because I could not figured out "the problem"--which was embarrassingly simple to fix, actually.
Now I could not access my home folder. It existed. It contained "no contents" but it was clear that I had not erased it because I did not lose data on the hard drive. So I tried a number of things.
The Tech--DeltaMac--made a few suggestions. Primarily this had to do with repairing the disk image under Disk Utility. I tried this and figured out what the problem was.
I have a dedicated partition to OS 9 since this is an old machine that had a lot of OS 9 programs. I booted on that and could "look" at the OS 10 partition. This I learned a long time ago is useful if you have a problem with the OS 10 and you have not backed everything up! I can back things up from the OS 9 partition when I have been too dumb to back them up previously.
As above OS 10 I could not see the file vault image--just a file. The file would read as empty. When I tried the Disk Utility idea--I have a TechTool partition with Disk Utility--I could "see" the folder and confirm its size. I could not do anything with it booted on TechTools or Disk Utility. However, as noted below, I saw that the folder had a different name than my usual "user" name. This gave me an idea.
Booted from the OS 9 partition, I could "see" the User folder with unreadable files. I could also confirm the size of the file--~40 gig! I noticed that it had the same title as my normal user name save it added a "." in front of it: "idiot" became ".idiot". I tried the Disk Utility, but it would not read it.
I made a copy of the folder with OS 9, in case my next try screwed up. I then removed the "." from in front of the user name so it had the same name it always did--and is the same as my current OS 10 User in the active System Folder.
Rebooted . . . sacrificed a virgin to the Gods of Data . . . voila!
There was the Disk Image! I could now open it and type in the File Vault password. Opened! It took a while because I had to transfer a few Gigs at a time and empty them from that folder because of limited Disk Space.
I guess it is a "tribute" to encryption, but I am not doing it again!
Hope what I did helps someone else.
--J.D.