Encryption of external hard drive was interrupted! Now I can't repair it.

[Ceerial]

I was encrypting one of my external hard drives, and the connection was lost during encryption. And now I can not repair it, I can't do anything with it.

It was used as an Windows external harddrive before (NTFS?). I tried to make it an extended mac harddrive, encrypted and journaled.

I get a message where it says: Your computer can not read the disc you have inserted in the drive (translated from danish).

So I have 3 options:

Intialiser (not sure what's it is in english) .. Ignore and Eject.

but nothing happens when I select either of those options, it just asks for my password again.

Hope someone can help. I've searched everywhere on the web. And I'm starting to think I might as well throw it away. Which sucks, because it was quite expensive.

 

[switon]

RE: diskutil Terminal commands...

Hi Ceerial,

Sorry to hear about your problem. I have always worried about just such an event occurring.

When you say you were attempting to encrypt your external HDD, I assume you mean Apple's FileVault2 that uses its underlying CoreStorage logical volumes for the encryption. If so, then you might need to resort to the coreStorage terminal commands.

But first, turn on the Debug menu in Disk Utility:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1

and then in the Debug menu check "List all disks", "Show every partition", and "Force update of disks list". You then might upgrade the "Debug Message Level" to "All Messages" and see if any of the messages give you information on the status of the disk when you click on it. Is there a Recovery HD partition on the disk and can you mount it?

Failing this, does the Terminal command "diskutil list" give you the volume name? If your encryption had already converted the disk to CoreStorage, then what does "diskutil cs info /dev/diskXXX" or "diskutil cs info /Volumes/volumename" give? (The XXX should be the disk identifier for your disk.) If it has already been converted to a CoreStorage volume, then I would delete the CoreStorage volume using "diskutil cs deleteVolume UUID" where UUID is the CoreStorage volume ID, which forces a repartitioning of the drive. You might then be able to redo your FileVault2 encryption (or use the Terminal "diskutil cs convert" and "diskutil cs encryptVolume" commands to convert the disk to an encrypted volume). Type "diskutil cs" to see all of the alternative verbs that are possible.

...just some starting-point suggestions on how to proceed ... I would not "throw it away", as I'm pretty sure you will be able to retrieve the drive.

Good luck,
Switon

 

[Ceerial]

Thanks for the answer.

My mac is in danish, and I'm pretty new to macs. So I have to admit it's a little hard for me to understand how I will access this debug mode.

----------

Nevermind, I got it to work with debug enabled!

Thank you so much.

 

[switon]

Thanks for the answer.

My mac is in danish, and I'm pretty new to macs. So I have to admit it's a little hard for me to understand how I will access this debug mode.

----------

Nevermind, I got it to work with debug enabled!

Thank you so much.

Do you mean to say that you got your external disk to work, or that you got the Debug menu in Disk Utility to work?

Switon

 

[CRRobert]

Ceerial, can you tell me exactly how you got to fix it?!?!

external drive was in the process of being encrypted when it lost connection to the drive, so the process was interrupted.

It will not recognize the password to decrypt, and so now I can not mount it.

I can not even format it to get the disk back.

HELP please, I am not familiar with the terminal stuff either.