Over the last weekend I was reinstalling my older MacBookPro (late 2011 model) again after replacing its hard drive with a fresh and modern SSD drive from Crucial 512GB. That change was really necessary given that simple file operations took about a minute, and every system tools claimed that the HDD was fine.
So after installing Mavericks I moved my home folder to another partition to make it easier later to reinstall OS X again. But as it turned out it is not that easy, especially not given that OS X doesn’t support mounting of other encrypted partitions beside the system partition during start-up yet. If you had a single user only, you will be busted after the home dir move and a reboot. That’s what I experienced. As fix under such a situation put back OS X into the “post install” state, and create a new administrator account via single-user mode. With this account you can at least sign-in again, and after unlocking the other encrypted partition you will have access to your original account again.
Having to first login via an account which data is still hosted on the system partition is not a workable solution for me. So I was continuing to find a solution which let me unlock the second encrypted partition during startup. After some search I finally found a tool which actually let me do this. It’s called Unlock and can be found on Github. To make it work it installs a LaunchDaemon which retrieves the encryption password via the System keychain, and unlocks the partition during start-up. To actually be on the safe side I compiled the code myself with Xcode and got it installed with some small modifications to the install script (I may want to contribute those modifications back into the repository for sure :).
In case you have similar needs, I hope this post will help you to avoid those hassles as I have experienced.
Henrik Skupin: Moving home folder to another encrypted volume on OS X https://t.co/XO6wUIqqSH
Henrik Skupin: Moving home folder to another encrypted volume on OS X: Over the last weekend I was reinstalli… https://t.co/gd3uAw8Hlr
Hi there,
I came across your post whilst searching for the same and I don’t quite make our of that script in the Git. I’m using Mojave and I cannot find any CoreStorage volume group on my system at all. I noticed you said you had to modify that script a bit in order to make it work: any chance you can share the modified script?
-S
Sorry, but it’s been a long time since I had to do it. Also it looks like that I did not contribute back those changes. :/ That means I don’t know anymore what I actually did to the install script. I will soon have to setup a new MacBook again, but might not choose this way of partition anymore mostly because I started to see problems with several applications and no-one else can reproduce. I imagine that this is caused by moving the home folder to a different partition, which Apple doesn’t want to support.
yes,. it’s been long…….
I always move the home/Users directory to a different location without having any issue at all but never tried with a encrypted 2nd partition/volume. But this time I have to b’cuz of some new regulations at work, hence on your page.