FileVault issue

[TrenchMouth]

Long Story / short =

I have a new job, I like it, I get to use my Mac at work, I would like to use FileVault to protect my stuff as my computer is more public now (always connected, admired by fellow co workers because it is a Mac )

so, today i went to activate FileVault and i got this:

that cant be right. i have a 40GB harddrive...

so, wtf?

 

[Eidorian]

What's your free space?

 

[SC68Cal]

I believe FileVault eats up a bit of space when you first turn it on, to encrypt. Looks like you're about four gigabytes short of the space that FileVault needs to set aside for it to do work. I know after FileVault is finished it releases all that space it annexed.

How much of your disk have you used so far? Are there any items that you can take off the hard drive and place in an external drive/other computer to free up some space?

A good candidate would be your Music Library.

 

[TrenchMouth]

What's your free space?

That is pretty crucial isnt it? Oops

I have 6GB of free space.

 

[TrenchMouth]

I believe FileVault eats up a bit of space when you first turn it on, to encrypt. Looks like you're about four gigabytes short of the space that FileVault needs to set aside for it to do work. I know after FileVault is finished it releases all that space it annexed.

How much of your disk have you used so far? Are there any items that you can take off the hard drive and place in an external drive/other computer to free up some space?

A good candidate would be your Music Library.

I think you are right, it is probably the Music Library that is taking up all the space.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

This exact problem was just discussed in a thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/205476/

That will show you how to fix that.


EDIT: and I know no one that has 4000 GB's!!!! of space. That's 4 Terabytes!!!

 

[Eidorian]

EDIT: and I know no one that has 4000 GB's!!!! of space. That's 4 Terabytes!!!

Where does it say 4000 GB? It's an iBook with a 40 GB hard drive.

 

[jsw]

Where does it say 4000 GB? It's an iBook with a 40 GB hard drive.

Look at the screen dump in the OP....

 

[Eidorian]

Look at the screen dump in the OP....

Ouch... I thought that was in MegaBytes.

 

[jsw]

Ouch... I thought that was in MegaBytes.

It is an odd bug... unless TrenchMouth actually has a 4TB drive, all of which is filled with his home folder, it appears that maybe, just maybe, FV is messed up.

I've heard nothing but bad things about FV. I recommend simply creating encrypted disk images for those items you most want to keep secret.

 

[SC68Cal]

I totally missed that it said GB instead of MB! There's something wrong with that.

 

[TrenchMouth]

Thanks for the help.

I worked around it by moving my music folder to my external, turning on filevault and then moving everything back. worked like a charm.

very interesting problem though.

EDIT: btw, the link to the other forum provided links to another forum with links to the answer. So, in an attempt to skip the middle man, here is the best explination that i have found so far:

(taken from MacZealots, http://maczealots.com/tutorials/security/3/)

OK after digging around I found a possible solution for this. Find an external HD, copy your Home directory contents ALL OF THEM to that external location, delete your home dir sparse image. This will cause FileVault to shrink your dir to a negligible size. You must then repair permissions, after that you may turn off FileVault with no problems. Copy the contents of your home dir back from the external HD into Home and you’re golden!

This bug apparently involves an incorrect “calculation”. All it does is (4000 + HDsizein_GB) and reports a value around 4074.6GB as the required space. I don’t understand what Apple software engineers were thinking, possibly they were confused with external 4TB RAID arrays and they just made 4074.6 the maximum possible space you could require. Again, this is just supposition, take it with a grain of salt.

Anyways, follow the instructions in the first paragraph and you should be good. I don’t pretend to have cooked these instructions up, I got them from dear old Google. For more information I suggest (http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/485000104731/r/817006204731). That is the page I got this information from.

Youssef Francis

It's weird, but that's the way it is.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

I totally missed that it said GB instead of MB! There's something wrong with that.

Yeah like I said, there have been other threads with this problem.

Sorry about not pasting the actual link and making you find it TrenchMouth, but I have this disease that forbids me sometimes from going the extra mile. It's called Laziness and I pray for a cure