Why does my Mac OSX say “update needed” on every boot?

Why does my Mac OSX say “update needed” on every boot?

If you recently reinstalled your Mac with OS X you might notice that every time you reboot when you try to login instead of showing the username of the first user account created it shows an icon with the text “Update Needed”. You can of course enter your master password and then the user icon will be displayed and you can log in as normal. This doesn’t seem like a huge deal, except when you’ve had this issue for months and you are sick and tired of having to take an extra step to log in.

Anyway, apparently the root of the issue is that you are using an encrypted hard drive and reinstalled OS X. My guess is that part of the operating system is unable to perform an action on the hard drive after you reinstall and even though you provide the master password it doesn’t do much. But once you have identified the problem the solution become a bit logical:

In order to have the message “an update is needed” when you reboot disappear you are going to have to turn encryption on your hard drive off and then back on. Obviously when you perform an action that is going to write over all your data on your hard drive your best bet is to backup your entire computer. After you have performed a backup the next step would be to turn off Firevault. This would make your OS take all your information and write it back to the hard drive unencrypted. Depending on the speed of your computer and amount of information this could take a long time. After you hare completed unencrypting all your information you can either stop here or if you want it encrypted you know what to do now: Turn on Firevault again. The message by now should stop appearing, so you don’t need to turn on firevault again if that was your sole objective. But more likely than not, if you encrypted your hard drive you probably want it to be encrypted still. Again, this is a time intensive operation depending on the amount of data as now all your unencrypted that is going to get encrypted and written to your hard drive. I would go as far as recommending erasing all your free space after you are done to be safe if you have sensitive information.

Hope this helped!

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