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I just upgraded my system from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. When my system restarted, the Setup Assistant ran.

The Setup Assistant is asking me to configure things on my system that are already configured — location, internet connection, etc. Plus, it is forcing me to create a new user account, but my user account from Mountain Lion still exists (evidenced by the fact that when I try to enter my previous user name, Setup Assistant informs me that username is taken and won't let me continue).

Seeing as how my system is already configured, I'd like to skip the Setup Assistant.

How do I do that?

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  • you could try force quit ctrl + alt + esc – Macmaniman Oct 24 '13 at 1:03
  • I just went ahead and deleted the newly created account afterwards. Apple probably wants to make sure that you have a usable admin account by creating a new one. – nohillside♦ Oct 24 '13 at 4:50
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It may be possible for you to bypass the Setup Assistant by creating a file at /var/db/.AppleSetupDone. This can be done by: booting up into single user mode.

The following command will mount the boot drive as read/write device, create the .AppleSetupDone file, and restart your computer

mount -uw / && touch /var/db/.AppleSetupDone && reboot

If your user account is actually intact, you will be able to login to the computer, and everything will be normal. However, in some of these situations, it's possible that your user account doesn't actually exist (unlikely based on the fact that you can't recreate it), or that your password hash is not a supported one (or is missing).

If you cannot login normally after disabling the Setup Assistant, you can re-enable it by removing the file that you created above. This can be accomplished by booting back into single user mode, and performing the following command:

mount -uw / && rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone && reboot

Once you've restarted, create a differently named user account (Admin?), and use that account to survey the scene. With the newly created user, make sure that you see an existing account for your previous user in System Preferences. If the user exists, it may help to reset the password for that user (to re-create the hash), and then attempt to login.

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