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Filevault problems

J

JB3

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 6, 2011
2
0
Hi

I am having problems with filevault and would appreciate any input from others with ideas on how to solve it.

I have a plastic MacBook (C2D, Snow Leopard) and recently had to hard reboot after a system freeze. Following this, the mac would not boot from the HDD (I am simply getting a flashing question mark on bootup). My home folder was encrypted with filevault, but the HDD itself was not (as is normal for Snow Leopard).

I have swapped in an older bootable HDD and am happy the rest of the mac is working fine and am able to mount the problematic HDD in an external enclosure. Most of the filesystem is all there, but my home folder data - which should be showing up as a nice fat sparsebundle - is empty.

I take pretty regular backups, so there's not too much missing, but it would be nice to retrieve the sparsebundle so that I can get the maximum amount out. I have used diskutility to no avail.

If anyone has ideas on how to recover the sparsebundle to obtain my data, I'd be grateful.

Thanks v much
 
Just as an update to the above - and to help anyone who may have similar issues - I began to do some digging in the terminal to see what else might be found.

Alongside my (sadly) empty /Volumes/HDD1/Users/[username] folder, which ought to have held the [username].sparsebundle file, there was also a hidden folder called [.username]/, which held a copy of the sparsebundle. This obviously isn't visible in Finder, due to the full stop at the beginning of the name.

It was therefore very simple write out:
sudo mv /Volumes/HDD1/Users/.username /Volumes/HDD1/Users/temporaryusername.

By doing this, there suddenly appeared a "temporaryusername" folder in the Finder, with a sparsebundle that is easily opened. Much of the data appears to be intact (even if the drive might be a goner).

Hope that helps others in the same situation.
 
Last week I received a refurb iMac. I was surprised when it booted up Lion, as I was expecting Snow Leopard. I then used filevault 2 and encrypted the disc. Later that day, a update notice popped up, asking if I wanted to do a iMac firmware upgrade. I agreed to do it.

Thereafter, it would not boot up. After going through the initial bong sound, the progress indicator would spin a while and then turned to the do not proceed mark (circle with line through it.) I phoned applecare support and worked on if for a while, but no progress. Took it to the apple store and explained the series of events. He did some testing on it and found that the machine had been intially loaded with Snow Leopard, and upgraded, by apple, to Lion. He said that they had seen that before, (no booting after on an encrypted drive after a firmware upgrade) and the only way to fix it was to completely nuke the hard drive, and reload it natively with lion. He said that the machines that they had experienced this problem on were all using filevault 2 followed by a firmware upgrade. After rebuilding the hard drive, the machine is stable again. Based on the tech's recommendation, I did not try to encrypt it with filevault 2 again... For what it's worth....
 
Fv2 & pgp

APPLENEWBIE said:
Based on the tech's recommendation, I did not try to encrypt it with filevault 2 again...
Click to expand...

Firmware updates for your Mac hardware require access to the following partitions:
1. The EFI-partition (invisible within the standard Disk Utility)
2. The startup partition (/System/Library/CoreServices/Firmware Updates/)

This is only possible, if your disk is not encrypted. My recommendation for FV2 users is:
1. Decrypt the disk and restart.
2. Update the firmware of your Mac and restart.
3. Encrypt the disk again.
 
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