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Mac Pro automatically logs me out immediately after log in??
Hi,
Hopefully someone can help me. I’m new to Macs (just made the move a couple of months ago for Final Cut) and I am trying to determine why my (Feb 2008) Mac Pro running OSX Leopard has started logging me out immediately after I log in, and what I can do to fix this.
I am correctly entering the password (just in case you thought I didn’t know the password) as it accepts it and logs in, starts to change the desktop background and then just as the Finder bar appears I am logged out and send straight back to the main login box.
It does this for the main User (admin) account. I have tried booting in safe mode and this does the same thing. The Guest login does work however.
I believe this started becahse my mac was taking an inordinately LONG time to shutdown (>3min) and I powered down the machine manually during the grey screen after waiting too long. Since then this log in problem has occured – essentially locking me out of my computer.
BootCamp Vista also works fine.
I have booted from the OSX disk and ran a Repair Permissions and that did not work either.
I have also tried booting into console mode using Cmd+s and looking at the logs -but I have very anemic Unix skills so basically all I can do is list files and read the log. I don’t know enough about the mac boot process to know what to look for let alone to fix it and the command line.
I’m under AppleCare but there are no Genius bars near me so I thought I’d try here in case some wisdom rubbed off on me. 😉
Any help would be very much appreciated as an install and losing my app settings and Virtual Machines in the OSX partition would be really bad. (and no I haven’t used Time Machine yet. I did do a Carbon Copy Cloner clone, but it’s a few weeks old and I’d rather not resort to that yet…)
thanks for any assistance! 🙂
Sam
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2 Replies
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There’s a lot of things that can be
done at this point, but the easiest option
might be to go into the single-user mode
if possible. If you can do a “su passwd” there
to set up a root account – if there isn’t one already –
and boot into multi-user mode and login as root,
then you can set up a new admin account
separate from the one that’s causing problems.I’m guessing one of the auto-launch-upon-login
items in that problem account is the culprit.
Similar things can happen in the Win environment
as well.HTH
-Shin -
Thanks I’ll try that.
My system was set up by my digital video vendor and I haven’t been able to take it in to have them look at it and I don’t know off the top of my head whether there is a root account or not – the main account I am interested in is called User – so I assume it is not root. I’m used to logging in as Admin in Windows (because so many apps have problems with permissions installing etc if you don’t in Windows) and I should probably follow best practices for the Mac/Unix world now…
One question though if I do set up another account – how can i repair the original User account so that I can remove the offending startup app that is causing the problem – I’d really rather not lose my settings for that account.
thanks 🙂
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