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After upgrading to Lion, I tried creating a guest account and it worked.

I enabled FileVault on Lion and went through the process of encryption. After that, when I am trying to create a Guest account, the option itself is disabled.

I am unable to create a Guest account on Lion . I wanted to check if this is the usual behavior with FileVault enabled Macs since I could not find any related articles on this .

Sairam
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    Looking at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790 for FileVault2 , it makes perfect sense not to have a Guest account !

    Just found the above link from http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17889

    – Sairam Jul 22 '11 at 06:42
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    FYI: In the latest version of Lion, Safari-only guest accounts ARE permitted, even after using Filevault 2. – Max Cho Nov 06 '11 at 19:09

1 Answers1

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If you hover over the disabled option, a tooltip appears explaining that the guest account can't be activated with FileVault turned on:

enter image description here

This is because the new FileVault uses full-disk encryption that's decrypted by the login password of one of the users. As the guest account, by its nature, does not have a password, that would leave your computer completely unprotected. You can still create an account for guest purposes as a regular account though.

it has been noted that this hover tip may take some time to display and can be difficult to trigger for some people, but regardless of whether or not you can see the tooltip the answer to the question is the same

Kyle Cronin
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