Mac OS X 10.5.x Special Report: Keychain: Info lost

Some users are experiencing significant issues with the Mac OS X keychain after updating to Leopard. These include:

• Persistent prompts for the keychain password
• Loss of keychain data
• Inability to run Keychain First Aid

Some sample reader reports:

• "(After updating to Leopard) keychain information is not installed and cannot be imported. Also a item call pubsubagent keeps requesting (about every 15-20 min) access to the new keychain. I've turned off RSS in both mail and Safari in the hopes that will get rid of that request."
• "The only thing I had happen to me was leopard killed my keychain for my user. So far only happened on one account and I had a backup (I did a complete backup last night)."
• "Had some serious keychain problems and spent several hours on the phone with Apple Support. While everything 'seems' to be working ok, keychain first aid will not run on either verify or repair, it quits immediately." -- Larry

Apple addresses one of these issues, where an error message stating "Keychain 'name" cannot be found to store 'sampleitem'" appears. Per the document, if "Reset To Defaults" is clicked two times, a new, empty keychain will be created. Apple says "Previously-stored passwords will not be present in the new keychain, but this issue should no longer occur." If you want to recover your former passwords however, you can use the workarounds listed in Knowledge Base article #306862.

If your keychain is missing completely and you have it stored on a backup disk, you can use the instructions in this MacFixit article to restore it.

If your issue still isn't resolved, try some of the solutions listed in our tutorial "Keychain issues; resolving."

Resources