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Thursday 15 March 2012

removing accounts from a filevault2 login screen at bootup

This post is more for IT people dealing with mac's in a corporate environment..   essentially we have a high turnover of sales people at my office and i'm constantly recycling machines but preserving old user accounts for processing and maintaining account / client data.

as soon as you have over 4 or so accounts on a machine i find the encryption fileVault boot screen gets to be a bit crowded and there's really only usually 1 active account at any given time on the machine so whats the best way to hide or remove the accounts from fileVault boot without actually removing the accounts?

Its pretty easy.   Just set the accounts passwords to nothing..  The only caviet here is that you can only set a user account password to nothing via the terminal.   here's the easy steps.


Step 1: Log in to the account that will not be able to unlock FileVault.
Step 2: Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
Yes, I know. You hate Terminal. But you have to use it because you can't remove your password via the GUI.
But you can delete it in Terminal. Just type passwd at the prompt. You will be asked for your "Old Password" (that is, your current password), and then you will be asked for a new password, twice. Enter your current password, then just press the Enter/Return key when asked for a "New Password" and "Retype New Password."
thats all.   Next time you reboot those accounts with no password will vanish!

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