Mysterious crashes? Try repairing the sparseimage

Jun 08, '04 10:45:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I had an issue where everything seemed to crash at once (Help, Safari, Mail, etc.) Even Disk Utility died. But, I have the FileVault protection on my user account. And, it appears that the permissions on the user directory got borked. When you try to run Disk Utility from another user account, it can't check the permissions inside the FileVault protected image. Here's how to get around that:

  1. Log in as another user. If you have root enabled on the machine, that will work fine too.
  2. Go to /Users/your_username and double click to mount the sparseimage file. It will prompt you to enter your password to mount this image.
  3. Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility
  4. Unmount the sparseimage. Note that the file name will still show up in the list of drives. Click on the sparseimage and chose "Repair Drive."
  5. Log out (I suggest rebooting) and try to log into your user again.
Hopefully, everything should be working again!

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