Cannot login in Lion

[GregAC]

While my Lion install (10.7, no updates applied yet) boots fine, I cannot get past the login screen. If I enter my password I get a grey screen for a brief time and then it immediately returns to the login screen. I tried adding a new user account (By removing .AppleSetupDone from /var/db so setup assistant ran again and created another one for me) but that also fails to login.

This install has been working fine for several months and I haven't done any major changes so I have no idea why it would suddenly break. There may have been some FS corruption, which I believe I've fixed so potentially some file crucial to the login procedure is damaged or missing. Does anyone have any ideas?

Background on FS corruption:
One day while booting along with the normal apple logo I was getting a progress bar, which took a long time to complete. When I finally made it to the login screen I had the above problem so I decided to investigate. Booting in verbose showed that fsck was finding an error in the filesystem, specifically an 'Incorrect number of thread records'. fsck was unable to repair it, as was disk utility in the Lion installer. I managed to repair the disk using Disk Warrior. This broke my bootloader but I can boot using a multibeast install of Chimera on a USB drive for now. fsck no longer reports any errors.

 

[arpetwe]

Something like this happened to me earlier when I installed Lion ...

Turned out my audit folder was messed up ...

You can see if this is YOUR situation by booting into single mode with -s

and do the following:

fsck -fy

mount -uw /

rm -rf /private/var/audit

mkdir /private/var/audit

exit

See if that helps ....

 

[karacho]

Try to boot in single user mode by typing -s on the chameleon bootscreen. When you can get to the root terminal type:

fsck -fy

If fsck found issues and has altered, repaired, or fixed anything, it will display this message: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
Important: If this message appears, repeat the fsck command you typed above until fsck tells you that your volume appears to be OK.

After that type the commands "arpetwe" mentioned above

 

[GregAC]

Thanks guys, deleting the audit directory did the trick.

There were also a couple of minor FS errors (probably as a result of me hitting the power halfway through a boot), which were fixed.