A fix for a no login screen problem

Sep 12, '03 10:06:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Background Mac OS 10.1.5 in use for months, auto login has been off ... users have to login upon boot. Did a lot of open source downloading in the prior week. Installation included creating a user (postgres) in UNIX. postgres user did not have a picture for the login screen, but 10.1.5 was OK with that as the user was displayed with no picture at all in the login window (only background showing).

Symptom This week, I installed 10.2.3 upgrade over 10.1.5. All went fine, including the startup sequence completing successfully with each reboot. However, no login window appeared.

Trial and Error Apple tech support had me do the following: repair the disk and permissions, reset open firmware, safe boot, reset PRAM, reset PMU. In other words, all the stuff you do when nobody knows what's wrong. Then they had me do an archive and install with preserve users and network settings. None of the above made a difference.

Then I messed around with the NetInfo database in UNIX-geek-land by doing a single-user boot to the UNIX prompt. Apple tech support helped me get out of a jam in this area, but still no login screen.

The Eventual Solution

  1. Enable autologin manually
    1. boot into single-user mode (Command-S during boot sequence).
    2. Follow the on-screen instructions for write-enabling the boot disk.
    3. cd /Library/Preferences
    4. Edit com.apple.loginwindow.plist, and add a key named autoLoginUser with a string value of "userID," where "userID" is the UNIX user ID of the user to auto-login.
  2. Reboot into the real OS X (finally!).
  3. Using the NetInfo Manager GUI (in /Applications -> Utilities), find the postgres user and copy to its picture the login picture from another user whose picture appears at login.
  4. Disable autologin in the Accounts system preference panel.
  5. Power up into real OS X.
  6. Voila ... I have a login window!
All this caused by one user with a password who didn't have a picture!

Small thanks to...Big Thanks to blackhat.com for the document Locking Down OS X, which gave me the plist key that permitted me to dig all the way out.

This took up an entire weekend, by the way.

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