El Capitan FileVault / CoreStorage dilemma

[qubex]

Hello.

First of all: I’m running 10.11.2 on a late 2012 MacMini i7 with an internal SSD and an extra “spinning rust” hard drive to serve as Downloads, Photos, Music, and Virtual Machine storage. The latter three partitions are encrypted with FileVault (as, normally, is the main system drive SSD).

For reasons unknown, my Mac was sluggish when I returned from my holidays so I rebooted it… lightly at first, and later by invoking “sudo shutdown -h now” because it had hung.

Later, it refused to boot… I have verbose boot enabled and everything went as normal, until it got to loading the GUI and then (I later discovered, by SSHing in and looking at /var/logs/System.log) lsd would segfault.

Anyway, after much despair, I eventually reloaded from a TimeMachine backup.

Unfortunately the three encrypted partitions are now not visible, and by messing around with diskutil and its ilk I get messages such as “disk4 is a CoreStorage Logical Volume which failed to mount” and similar.

From within DiskUtility the partitions are greyed out.

I’m at my wit’s end. Can anybody explain to me what I can do to either mount these partitions or revert the encryption on them and then re-enable FileVault? Basically I want to restore access to my stuff.

 

[qubex]

OK, a bit more information in case somebody finds this in a Google search…

It turns out that the problem is that the UUIDs I entered into /etc/fstab to auto-mount the partitions have been changed by the reinstallation and therefore no longer match.

This hasn’t quite solved my problem (yet) because diskutil now reports a bunch of UUIDs (courtesy of CoreStorage) for each partition.

 

[peetah]

I'm currently going through a similar problem minus the filevault problems. Like you, it appears the UUIDs on the disks were changed or something stupid happened along the way (i haven't figured it out yet). If there is a way to change the UUIDs to the previous values this mess should clear itself up.

 

[qubex]

Have you found such a method?

I’m about to give up and resort to the old ‘labels’ way of identifying drives in /etc/fstab using this syntax:

LABEL=Apps  /Applications hfs 1 2

but it feels like an utter defeat…

 

[peetah]

Have you found such a method?

I’m about to give up and resort to the old ‘labels’ way of identifying drives in /etc/fstab using this syntax:

LABEL=Apps  /Applications hfs 1 2

but it feels like an utter defeat…

Shortly after my last post I found a thread by someone on superuser.com who modified some code that tries to assign the UUID. Sadly, only the first 64 of the 128 bit UUID can be user specified as OS X appends a hash of the date and several other system parameters to the UUID when it's written to the disk.

 

[qubex]

Excuse me, but what do you need to do with the UUIDs? Do you want me to talk you through finding the new UUIDs and entering them into your /etc/fstab?