Cannot login directly into user account - first have to login as administrator

Question

I updated my Macbook to 10.9 Yosemite, and at the same time I encrypted the user data partition. The system partition was already encrypted. I use an administrator account with admin rights, and a user account without admin rights, for normal use.

The admin account is on the system disk, the user account is on the user partition, using a symlink in /Users. This setup worked with 10.8, system partition encrypted, user partition not.

Now it turns out that when I startup the computer, I cannot login with the user account. First I have to login as administrator, then I logout, then I can login with the user account.

Of course this is not what I want. How can I fix the login process so I can login directly into the user account?

Answer 1

We've seen this behavior before when we migrate a user account onto a computer that already has FileVault disk encryption enabled, because the new user's login password isn't eligible to decrypt the disk at boot time.

We resolve it in that case by bringing up the Security preference pane, which contains a warning that not all users are eligible to decrypt the disk, and steps you through fixing it (by providing the additional user's login password).

I'm not sure if this also applies to symlinked home directories, but it's the first thing I'd check.