Hello Community and Dear Apple Developer Community,
I shouldn’t have done it… I was already using Sequoia Beta 3 on my Mac Studio. Everything was running stable, and I had been able to work productively with it for a while (weeks).
Recently, I decided to enable FileVault. Said and done, but unfortunately, something went wrong: since then, I can no longer log in with my normal user account (which has admin rights). Instead, only the guest user appears on the login screen (and no other account appears even when hovering over it). When I log in as this guest user, it behaves differently than usual. Only Safari can be started, and the only other things I can do are shut down or restart the system. Something has gone seriously wrong with the beta, I would say. Of course, I know I use a beta at my own risk, but I would still very much like to get back to working properly on my Mac without having to reinstall everything.
Who can help? I’ve always managed to solve issues myself so far, but in this case, I’m not sure where to start. I can still open a terminal from the recovery utilities and see the SSD utilization, etc. I can also navigate the file system to a basic extent, but I don’t see any entries under Applications or Users with ‘ls -la’, probably because the file systems are mounted with ‘nobrowse’. A current mount entry of the actual boot disk looks like this:
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/Macintosh HD (apfs, sealed, local, read-only, journaled, nobrowse)
My questions are:
1. Is it sufficient to mount the drives with different options to access them properly again?
2. How do I solve the “only Safari” problem of the guest user?
3. How can I re-enable my existing real user (especially since it is an admin)?
4. Can I disable FileVault from the recovery terminal? If so, how?
5. Would a Sequoia boot stick help me? For Silicon Macs, it is supposedly not that simple but doable.
It’s also important to note that I have no access to any GUI, as I can only log in as a guest user with Safari. However, I still have other Macs to fall back on (including a MacBook Air M1).
If anyone knows something about my problem, I would appreciate constructive responses.
Has anyone else had similar experiences with the Sequoia Beta (now Public Beta)?
Thank you for your help,
Marcus