Last week I tried to log into my FileVault protected user account and got an message at the login window, "Unable to log in to the user account (name) at this time". I logged into the root account and tried to mount the sparseimage manually and got a "input/output" error upon mount. Basically, I was screwed.

I tried to copy the 18GB disk image to a external drive, but I kept getting a error -36 after several hundred megabytes were copied. After messing around with it for a while I got the idea to change it from a .sparseimage to a .dmg by just changing the extension. Sure enough, I was able to mount the disk image. I thought I would then have access to my files, but the finder was extremely slow just building the list of files, sometimes takes minutes per file.

With 18GB of files, it would take forever to even build the list of files. Assuming it would even be successful at building the file list after spending all that time trying. I started messing with disk recovery software. Disk Utility was able to repair some of the damage, but it seemed to cause more damage. Disk Utility left me with "Missing thread record (id = 11025)" messages that it couldn't fix and it left me with a unmountable disk image. I then used Disk Warrior and it's scavenge function to build a new catalog file.

Disk Warrior worked mostly. It did create a new catalog file but many files were unrecoverable. I did have backups of most of the important stuff, it would have been easier to just copy everything whole from the disk image. Seeing as how that wasn't going to happen I concentrated on the stuff I didn't have. Mostly stuff from my Library folder, application specific settings. Things like my Mail.app messages (Apple really should store these in the users Document folder).

When the finder tried to copy a file that was corrupt, instead of just skipping the file, it errors. I couldn't just select all files and copy them at once, I had to copy one by one for the most part. Which means I missed a lot of stuff. Like the scripts I use to publish this blog.

After I got everything set up in a new user account, it was 2.3GB. What happened to the 16GB I had in my original account? Don't know and so far I haven't missed anything. Hopefully I don't miss them later.