How to Repair a Corrupt MacOS Profile

[askjason]

Hi Mac Experts,

I have an end user who started the Sonoma upgrade and powered their laptop off during the upgrade process. When they powered it back on, it finished the upgrade, but they can't login with their main account.  My tech team was able to login with our admin account. I also was able to create a new account for them on the computer, which works fine. I know I can just migrate their data over from the corrupt account to the new one, but I really want to fix the old one. So here is what happens:

• They boot their laptop.
• At the login screen they enter their original username and password
• It starts loading their profile and they see the new Sonoma desktop background.
• Then it gets stuck,  nothing else loads, you can't control the computer with either your keyboard or mouse. 
• Their only option is to power cycle the machine and log in as another user.

So from a MacOS technical prospective, what items are necessary for a profile to work correctly? What parameters, plists, etc. could be broken that would cause that one user profile not to load fully?

Thanks for ahead of time for any suggestion/info.

Sincerely,

Jason

[agyekum28]

Throwing out ideas here, you could boot into safe mode and delete cache files (after backing up the cache files), or in safe mode look for the corrupt .plist, or you can maybe make a new user account and copy the contents from the usr folder of the corrupt account to that new created account. If you do have time machine enabled you can go back to a known good screenshot

[dmichels]

Just a thought... what if you just go to delete the Local Account?

• System Settings
• Users & Groups
• Click on the i
• Delete User
• Don't change the home folder

So when the user logs back in their files will be there. 

[AJPinto]

If this was a widespread issue I would say dig at seeing what corrupted in the profile. However, with it being a single device, it is probably not worth the labor investment to fix.

[AJPinto · Accepted solution]

If this was a widespread issue I would say dig at seeing what corrupted in the profile. However, with it being a single device, it is probably not worth the labor investment to fix.

[curran]

I remember this happening a year or so ago a few times. If I recall, the fix was changing the password for the account unable to fully log in.

[askjason]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the suggestions.

• @curran I had already tried the changing the password. That didn't solve the issue.
• @dmichels I took your suggestion and deleted the account and saved the home folder. It renames the home folder to [username]+"(Deleted)". When I recreated the user it just created a brand new home folder. So that didn't help. Next I did the following:
  • I deleted the new user
  • Renamed the old home folder by removing "(Deleted)" from its name
  • Recreated the user's account.
  • This time it recognized there was an existing folder, but it didn't update it with anything new. I was really hoping it would just replace the corrupted user files with brand new ones, which possibly could have solved the issue. 
  • Tried logging as the new user and nothing changed. It still hung up after loading the background image. 
• So as @AJPinto stated, since this is not a system wide issue, it wasn't worth investing any more time on trying to fix the corrupted profile. I just created a new user and imported in the Desktop, Documents, and Application Support and Preferences folders. This gave them back most of what they were missing. 

Thanks again for everyone's help,

Jason

[dmichels]

OK sorry it did not go perfect. One more thing I would have done, is when the user logged in they would have had access to the Old Home Folder. I would have had them log in and move all their files from old folder to new folder. 

[emanueldiaz_09]

I've seen this issue before. I'm not sure what causes it, but I just rebuilt the profile for the user. 

You may need to be able to log in to an admin account on the device. If you can without the device freezing/getting stuck you should be able to pull a files they need. 

When done, rename the users profile name in Finder Users/staffname to Users/staffname-old.

Then open System Settings > Users & Groups and delete the user having issues. 

Next have the user login in again if you use user provisioning with Jamf connect or NoMAD. Or simply just create the user profile from the admin account with a password. 

When the new user account is created go to System Settings > Users & Groups then click on the "i" next to the new user profile to point their old profile back to them. 

If there are still issues, leave the new profile without pointing their old one, and just move their files over manually.