[Atheist]

A little info on my setup:

Core i7 Hackintosh
10GB RAM (formerly 12GB)
6 HDs:
- 64GB SSD Boot Drive
- 1.5TB Media
- 1.5TB Media
- 500GB USB Time Machine
- 500GB USB Media
- 500GB USB Home Directory (since the SSD is so small)


Here's the sequence of events:

1. Short power outage at 4 AM. My UPS battery died months ago so it's basically acting as a surge protector now.... thus my computer is off when I get up this morning.

2. Grab a cup of coffee, feed the puppy, turn the computer on. Motherboard issues a shrill beep for a few seconds and then continues booting as normal. This is not abnormal as the heat and humidity here is already taking a toll on my 1.5 yr old motherboard. One of the memory slots is dead and I suspect the beep is indicating another is probably on it's way out.

3. Computer boots as normal except instead of seeing my desktop (auto login is turned on) I see a message:

"You are unable to log in to the user account (me) at this time"
"Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."

Gee thanks Apple for your meaningful error messages. This is where their less-is-more mantra fails miserably.

4. Oh yeah... I forgot to power up the USB drives before booting up. I reach back and turn on the 3 USB drives. Here's were it gets a little weird. I click the OK button on the error message and now I get another message telling my my home folder is not in the expected location so it logs me in using my default home folder on the boot drive.

5. Okay I say... I'll just go into the user settings and set my home directory back to the USB drive. The USB drive is mounted and accessible. I'm able to look at it through Finder without trouble. After setting the home folder back to the USB drive, I reboot.

6. And now I'm back where I started:

"You are unable to log in to the user account (me) at this time"
"Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."

The only difference is that this time, the USB drive is on. And now it won't magically default to logging me in using the home folder on the boot drive.

I can boot in single user mode and view the HOME volume (the USB drive with my home folder). It's not reporting any kind of error on the drive that I can see.

I've only got one account setup on this box so I can't log in as a different user.

Does anyone know what plist I could edit so I can point my home directory back to the boot drive? That would at least allow me to log in and somehow figure out what's going on with the USB drive.

Any help is appreciated...

[besson3c]

No plist for that, just symlink your home directory to your drive.

What do your logs say when you try to login? This may be one of those rare times where repairing your permissions might help.

[Atheist]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

No plist for that, just symlink your home directory to your drive.

I'm not sure I follow. As it stands now, I technically have 2 home directories:

/Users/me
/Volumes/HOME/me

When I set up the computer /Users/me was my home directory. I subsequently changed it to /Volumes/HOME/me. That's done via the advanced options:



I'm certain that somewhere a plist setting is telling OS X to use /Volumes/HOME/me as my home directory. It's not a symbolic link. I say that because /Users/me was still available after I had set /Volumes/HOME/me to my home directory.

I don't think it's looking at /Users/me at all when I attempt to log in.

What do your logs say when you try to login? This may be one of those rare times where repairing your permissions might help.

Since I can't log in, I can't use the console to see the logs. I'm not sure exactly where in the file system the logs would reside.

I need a solution that can be accomplished while logged in single user mode.

[besson3c]

Your logs can be accessed in single user mode, they reside in /var/log, just tail or cat them

[Atheist]

Okay...I'm getting closer. But still not quite there.

I figured out how to change the users home directory while in single-user mode. It's with the dscl command. You have to first launch the DirectoryServices daemon:

$ launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist

To see what the current setting is type:

$ dscl . -read /Users/username NFSHomeDirectory

To change it:

$ dscl . -change /Users/username NFSHomeDirectory /Path/To/Current/Folder /Path/To/New/Folder

With that I was able to reset my home directory to /Users/me and log into the computer. But I'm still not able to change the folder to my HOME volume (the USB drive).

When logged in with /Users/me as my home directory, OS X mounts my HOME volume as /Volume/HOME as expected. I then change my home directory using the Accounts Preferences Pane back to /Volumes/HOME/me and reboot. No luck. The HOME volume is now getting mounted as /Volumes/HOME 1 and there is an empty directory at /Volumes/HOME. When I log in single-user mode, there is nothing at /Volumes/HOME so I'm really confused.

I've got another SATA hard drive I'm going to install and see if I can get that working as the home folder.

[besson3c]

I don't understand why a simple symlink wouldn't do you what you want?

[seanc]

Might be the simplest way out at this point.
I believe

ln -s /Users/me /Volumes/HOME/me

should do the trick.

[Atheist]

I'd rather not use a symbolic link because I prefer doing things the way the OS was designed. Maybe it's silly but it's just me. Plus, I've had enough trouble with symbolic links (see my iTunes thread) so I'd prefer to do it the "correct" way.

I've moved my home folder to an internal drive and used the Accounts Preference Pane to set my home folder accordingly. Everything is working fine now.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

[P]

Try looking in your /Volumes folder. Sometimes when crashing, the old mountpoint is not removed correctly. You will not see this, because OS X will simply create a new one under a different name. In your case, your USB drive would now be a /Volumes/HOME 1. This has no effect on the Finder, but plays havoc with UNIX paths.

If this is the case, the fix is simple: Unmount the USB drive. Remove the old mountpoint manually (rmdir HOME in the /Volumes directory should work). Mount the USB drive again. If you want to prevent this happening again, consider forcing the USB drive mountpoint manually (using /etc/fstab or similar).

EDIT: It turns out that fstab is deprecated in SL, so you should probably use the more modern way (the auto_master file) for a stable longterm solution.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Atheist 

I'd rather not use a symbolic link because I prefer doing things the way the OS was designed. Maybe it's silly but it's just me. Plus, I've had enough trouble with symbolic links (see my iTunes thread) so I'd prefer to do it the "correct" way.

I've moved my home folder to an internal drive and used the Accounts Preference Pane to set my home folder accordingly. Everything is working fine now.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I'm glad you got stuff working, but just to potentially save you time in the future, don't let your iTunes experience taint your experience of using symlinks. iTunes is just retarded, but normally symlinks are a perfectly acceptable way to get around problems like what you were experiencing, especially if you just desire a quick fix.