A fix for a FileVault home directory repair issue

Jan 20, '06 05:20:00AM

Contributed by: sydlow

Apple's Knowledge Base article on How to verify or repair a home directory image didn't work for me.

When I clicked repair at step 12, Disk Utilty was not able to repair the volume because of permission problems. After some research, I found the problem. The FileVault aegim file is not owned by the account you are logged in as to effect the repair, so when you attempt to use Disk Utility to repair it, it can't. To work around this issue, I added write permission using Terminal:

% sudo chmod g+w accountname.sparseimage 
Run this in the directory of the user you want to repair, and replace accountname with the user's short username. This will usually work, as all users belong to the group staff. You also need to do this command on the directory of the user's home directory
%sudo chmod g+w /Users/accountname
Now you can run Disk Utility to repair the image successfully. Remember to change the permissions back afterwards:
%sudo chmod g-w accountname.sparseimage
%sudo chmod g-w /Users/accountname
[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, as I'm still not using FileVault...]

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