I just did a restore from time machine on my MacbookPro (2013 on el Capitan). It seems to boot up just fine and takes me to the login page. I am able to click on an account and enter a password. When it goes to log in, I get alerts about needing to reset my keychain password. After that, the computer hangs only showing the background image. I have tried both resetting my keychain and cancelling the prompt, and I always get the same result. The prompts may be completely unrelated as well.

Here are some other things I have tried:

• Log into a non-admin account.
  • no keychain prompts, and it continues to hang
• Click on the guest account
  • It does not do anything when I try this. It never even leaves the accounts screen.
• Enter an incorrect password
  • It hangs on the password page with the box greyed out, and no functionality to any of the other buttons.
• Restore to a different backup
  • same results, although I may try going further back in time
  • Sign into single-user mode and follow the mounting steps as well as reset my password
• Reset the NVRAM as shown here: https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/207503/My+mac+is+stuck+on+the+white+startup+screen!
  • Followed the steps shown here: http://bensch.be/cant-login-to-osx-after-time-machine-restore and http://osxdaily.com/2011/04/25/change-admin-password-mac/
• Removed the .applesetupdone file to prompt machine setup at reboot
  • Per this site: http://www.hackmac.org/tutorials/how-to-create-a-new-administrator-account/
    
  • I get to the 'select a language page' and when I select, it just reboots

I would love some more ideas. I thought doing a restore would be fairly painless

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

Trish

A BIG WELCOME to FTM, Trish! I'm glad that you took my advice (at MacIssues) to post here. I'm sure that someone will be able to help.

Good luck!

When I had to restore from Time Machine following the failure and replacement of my iMac's hard drive, I experienced no problems.
From what I can see here, is it possible that when restoring from TM one requires the password in use at that time (such that earlier and later passwords would not work)?

Hi Trish and welcome...

Your list of attempted fixes is impressive, however, the answer you seek may simply be found HERE.

Let us know if that does it....

EDIT: Further research on your issue leads me to ask about whether you are using File Vault.....

If Macmaniac's suggestion does not solve your issue....

During a restore process the system may prompt for your AppleID password and unless you read the prompt carefully it is very easy to miss which particular password is being requested.

If that is not the case, and you still can't get it some more background information might be useful...

• Why did you do the restore? Was there a problem and if so specifically what was the problem?
• Specifically what steps did you follow to do the restore/recovery?

Thank you so much everyone for your responses. It has been a while since I have been able to return to this project, so I apologize for the late response.

I unfortunately cannot reset my keychain from System Preferences, because when I log in, I do have access to anything except the keychain prompts.

I was able to log into a non-admin account with some success. I say "some" because I can at least navigate around a bit, but am getting continuous alerts that "Finder quit unexpectedly" with Ignore and Report buttons. I have submitted reports from there to Apple, but not sure if that will do anything for me.

I was able to open System Preferences from that account and updated my user's password, but that did not gain me anything. I also created a new Admin account. I can log into that account, but still see the "Finder quit unexpectedly" message.

I do have a log from the report, but no way to get it to you. Are there any specific fields I should look at in the report?

I see:


Excuse any type-o's above, as I had to copy that log manually.

In response to why I was doing a restore: My system was running rather slow and finicky, so I thought a restore might make things better. Guess I was wrong

Oh, also, as far as I know, I'm not using File Vault. Is that an external app, or something that is pre-installed on the Mac?

I did notice that the mac can't seem to connect to my router, although it does see it. I don't even get prompted for a password. That may be a permission thing on my router settings, though, but I'd have to double check.

I will likely kick off another restore, and pay closer attention to any prompts during the process.

Thanks again everyone!

Also, thank you so much for the advice to head to this site, jchuzi! I'm so stuck on this, so glad I was pointed in a good direction to get help.

It's pre-installed. See the various links at this Apple Support page for more information.

From your description of the symptoms, I'll go out on a limb and guess that the hard drive is failing. Hopefully, I'm wrong.

FIXED IT!

Thank you everyone for helping me look into this! I ended up doing a reinstall of the OS (el Capitan, not Sierra yet). I thought that was refreshed when I did my restore, but I guess not. Once I reinstalled that, I was back up and running.

Things still seem to run slow to me (compared to my other macs), but I guess I have to chalk that up to being an older computer.

Thanks again!
Trish

That's great news, Trish! As to the slowness, perhaps it would be helpful if you gave us more information, specifically:

How much RAM is installed?
What is the capacity of the hard drive and how much free space does it have?

Here's some more info that may be useful:

After reading joemikeb's post about Checkmate, I downloaded and installed it. Checkmate found two problems with my Time Machine drive (at different times). The first was a damaged partition map, which I fixed with Disk Utility. The second involved a corruption of volume structures (AKA directory), which I fixed with Disk Warrior. DW found about 400 errors (probably most were minor) but was able to repair all of them. Because of the large amount of data on my TM drive (1.97 TB), both DW and DU took a long time. DW took several hours but it was successful.

I have no way of knowing if there would have been a problem if I had had to restore from TM, but it's possible that some sort of corruption on your TM drive was responsible for your difficulties.

Just a thought.

This is an annoying problem that can appear very resiliant to being fixed. This is in part due to a helpful/pesky keychain daemon that caches things that ought not to be cached, even after a user logs out.

1) restart (by any means necessary)
2) login as the affected user
STOP. do not click on stuff. just STOP as soon as you have entered your login username and password and clicked Login.
Did you click on something anyway? If so, return to step 1.
3) it should be saying it can't unlock your keychain. If there's information in your keychain you need (passwords you've forgotten) then you don't want to keep following these instructions. You'll need a bit more personal help than I can provide here in a general post.
4) click to reset keychain to defaults
5) enter the password you want to use to login to the computer. It's okay to use the password you just used. If you enter something different, that is what you will need to use from now on to login to the computer.
6) you may from time to time see an app pop up "asking to use the keychain" since you've changed it. You should be ok to click "always allow" for common sense things. (ical wanting access to your calendar, etc)

That's it. The biggest problem here is users clicking "login anyway", "continue", or "cancel" (varies) during the login errors. That gets the cfprefsd all flustered and it won't leave you alone until you reboot, and you can't fix the problem following ANY of the instructions on the web (short of the Nuclear option) when cfprefsd is doing that. I realize you've fixed the problem with the big hammer already, so this is more of a courtesy post for others searching the web looking for answers to this problem. (we get a lot of traffic looking for help)

FIRE VAULT :

Click on APPLE in the upper left corner / System Preferences / Security & Privacy / Fire Vault.

The tab will tell you whether or not Fire Vault in ON. To change, if desired, click the little padlock (lower left) and enter password. (Click on padlock to re-lock.)

I know that's where I keep all of my important fires!