Wednesday, April 15, 2009

My home folder became a removable disk on Mac OS X Leopard what should I do?

The home folder on my mac became a removable disk. Dose anyone know how to fix this? Please help me!


I think you may have turned on "File Vault". It is a security feature of OS X that changes your home folder into a "sparse disk image". That is a mountable disk image file encrypted by 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). It makes it virtually impossible for anyone, even the FBI, to see the files in your home folder without knowing your password. It will also lock you out if you forget your password. If your account is set for automatic login, you are wasting your time since your home folder disk image is opened and mounted when you "login". Apple needs to make File Vault impossible to enable with auto-login, duh!

You can turn off File Vault in System Preferences > Security.

If you like the idea of protecting some but not all the files in your home folder, you can create a secure disk image of a certain size (it doesn't have the ability to expand the way the File Vault image does) using Disk Utility. Read about it in Disk Utility Help.

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