FileVault not decrypting home account HELP!!

[Raid]

Last night everything was working fine, but I noticed the shutdown took longer than usual. Today I log in and get the generic user profile instead of my personal settings. Also my home folder has a file that says <username>.sparseimage, which I assume has all my documents located in side... which sucks cause I need them.

Here's what I've tried so far:
1) Shut down and restart... didn't work
2)Double clicking the .sparseimage file. It asks me for my password, it accepts my login password and then comes up with an error message that it failed to mout becausethe file had no mountable file systems!
3)Turn off filevault and restart. It says it was decrypting my file and that took a minute when it was done the login screen appeard and I log in again only to find that it didn't work.

Has anybody had this happen? and what did you do to fix it??

 

[Horrortaxi]

You regularly back up your important files, don't you?

 

[latergator116]

Will it allow you to login using "root"?

 

[Raid]

Originally posted by Horrortaxi
You regularly back up your important files, don't you?

Well yes and no... I do backup my really important files, but there's a ton of stuff I'd like to have back that was in there as well. But I don't know if I'm pooched just yet since I can see the encrypted file I think it is possible to get this stuff back... right?

 

[Raid]

Originally posted by latergator116
Will it allow you to login using "root"?

I can get in using root (or at least sudo). That account is still an admin account, but I'm not sure how to fix this in the command line.

 

[Horrortaxi]

Originally posted by Raid
since I can see the encrypted file I think it is possible to get this stuff back... right?

Not if it's corrupted. I don't know if it is, and if it is I don't know if you're hopelessly screwed. FileVault makes your entire home folder 1 big file so if there was a problem it could leave the file unusable. My hunch is that it's screwed if you can't access it the normal way.

I had a similar problem with Virtual PC a few days ago. VPC makes a disk image out of the Windows installation so it looks like 1 file to the Mac. I got impatient after telling Windows to shut down and force quit VPC. When I tried to start Windows later on the file was corrupted and unusable. Luckily I had a backup. Just because you can see the file doesn't mean you can do anything with it.

 

[Raid]

Originally posted by Horrortaxi
Not if it's corrupted. I don't know if it is, and if it is I don't know if you're hopelessly screwed.

I might be screwed... I made a copy of the original file and then changed my settings back to use FileVault so that I would have a new encrypted file to compare with under the same account. I logged out and came back in under a temp admin account I made and played with the file using disk utility.

I opened up the new encrypted file that I had just made and it worked like a charm after it asked me for the password (I could even do verify's and repairs on the image). Then I opened up the copy of the problem file and it was similar but different. The working file had a mountable drive listed as my username, the old one was named "disk3s2" and unmountable. Eventhough it wouldn't mount the disk image I tried to verify it and it came back with this:

Verifying volume “disk3s2”
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

1 volume checked
0 HFS volumes verified
1 volume failed verification

I think I'm screwed... I might have my important stuff on my laptop, but things like my pictures and personal projects might be lost. At least my MP3's were on a different volume!