External drive will not mount and wants to be initialized?

[kat.hayes]

I have an encrypted external drive that I just plugged into my iMac and it prompts me for the password to access the drive, though instead of mounting it pops up with a message indicating that it can not read the drive and it asks me if I want to initialize it, ignore, or cancel. I think this is the same message that displays when you plug in a new drive that needs to be formatted.

Anyone have any ideas what might be wrong? It seems to be able to still see that it is encrypted. Is the drive bad? Any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

Well, such are the hazards of encrypting drives, instead of "leaving them in the clear".

I'm going to guess that all the "repair pathways" that might otherwise be open to a non-encrypted drive, are blocked because of the encryption.

If the password doesn't work and you can't "get beyond it", not sure what else you can do, other than erase the drive and start over. I'll guess that a data recovery service couldn't even fix this.

That's why (with only one exception) I NEVER encrypt my drives.
(The only drive I have that requires a password is a backup I keep in the car. If the car was stolen, I can just replace it with ANOTHER backup. I have many backups).

Final thought:
What -format- is the drive in?
Is it in HFS+, or something else?

 

[chabig]

I would not blame encryption for this. It's correctly asking for the password, and then it's unable to mount. I think the drive is probably hosed. Before giving up, I'd certainly try rebooting the Mac, and also try the drive on another computer if possible. If all avenues are dead ends, then you'll have to go to your backup for the data.