Spontaneous password changed - new Catalina bug?

[Lifeisabeach]

So I had something very odd happen to me yesterday that "almost" locked us out of a Mac. I had to replace the SSD in the Mac mini my wife uses due to what appeared to be a failing controller on the SSD that was in there (an OWC Aura that I put in a few years ago). The process went fine... I had pre-cloned the old drive to the new and when all was said and done, it booted up fine 2 or 3 times and I logged in and out of her user account a few times no problem. So I set up the old SSD in an external housing to do a secure wipe of it and some time later, while checking on the process, I tried to remote into that Mac from another and her password didn't work. When the drive was done being wiped, I rebooted her Mac and again, after restart, her password wasn't recognized and I couldn't log her in. Thankfully I had myself set up on it also, so I was able to log in and reset her password back.

What happened is a complete mystery. Neither of us had changed the password and there wasn't anyone else in the house. I can't see how this may have been some corruption from the old SSD... the clone off of it worked fine several times before this happened. I've since enabled the option to allow resetting the password using her Apple ID, and did the same for myself on the other Macs. If I didn't have a second admin account on it, she would have been hard locked out, though I did have a second backup I had made plus Time Machine to recover from. I don't know if this is some weird Catalina issue that bit us or what.

 

[nickyr]

sounds like some sort of keyboard problem maybe.

have you checked all the keys (upper and lower case plus characters) work just fine?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

sounds like some sort of keyboard problem maybe.

have you checked all the keys (upper and lower case plus characters) work just fine?

Definitely not a keyboard problem. The password didn't work directly on her keyboard or remotely using Screen Sharing from another Mac.

 

[RavingMac]

Very odd . . . but great you were able to work around the problem.