Can't mount hard drive

[dfelix]

Hi,

I usually am quite savvy when it comes to fixing computers, but I stumbles unto something that has me stumped. I can't mount one of my externals. The volume just shows up greyed out in disk utility like so


In Disk Utility, my drive shows up greyed out

when I double click it to mount it, it tells me to go do it in Disk Utility

diskutil cs list output

The drive is encrypted as you can see, but should be unlocked. What's my move here?

 

[dfelix]

you have to find what's locking up the disk. With the disk no. you cs listed earlier, you then have to grep:


$ ps aux |grep disk4

it will tell you something like this
root 1141 44.7 2.5 4605972 426052 ?? R 11:06AM 1:56.00

The fsck_hfs -y process is what 's hogging the drive. Kill its PID:

$ sudo kill 1141

and macOS will tell you that it couldn't repair the drive, and you should consider backing up its data. macOS will then release the drive back to you, but it's contents will be read only. Here you have a few options:

1) Try to disk util first aid it. Do it via the GUI, it will probably tell you the catalog is bad

2) Move all data from the drive, format it, move the data back on it.

I'm still not sure what caused this, but I'm guessing Apple messed with core storage in anticipation of APFS. If this happens to you, I hope this "guide" can be of some use.