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Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
Is it possible to password protect an external (Seagate) USB 2TB drive that is already partitioned and has data on it? Or do you have to entirely delete the drive first? I hope it can be done. Thank you in advance for any responses.
 

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,445
9,317
That depends on how is it formatted. If it's Mac formatted, right-click on it and choose "Encrypt".
 

Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
Hey, thank you! Trying to do this and created the password, however, it's telling me "couldn't unmount disk".
 

Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
I should mention it's a partitioned 2 TB disk, so it mounts as "Blue 1" and "Blue 2"
 

Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
Okay, tried again and now Blue 2 is gone. I guess it unmounted. Is it a process that takes a while?

However, Blue 1 is still mounted, and when I control click it doesn't give me an option to Encrypt as Blue 2 did.
 

Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
Yeah, they're both mounted now but alas, no encryption. Maybe it's not the right kind of formatting? Here's a
Screen Shot 2022-09-25 at 5.08.12 PM.png
screenshot.
 

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,445
9,317
Sometimes it can take a while to unmount a disk. Is there were no data on Blue 2, the quickest way to encrypt it would be to reformat. But because there is data, encrypting just takes time, maybe even a few days. You can monitor the progress in Terminal by typing...

diskutil list

In the output from this command it should show the encryption progress in percentage. Be patient. As I said, it might take a day or more to complete.
 
Last edited:

Christopher11

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 10, 2007
707
66
Sometimes it can take a while to unmount a disk. Is there were no data on Blue 2, the quickest way to encrypt it would be to reformat. But because there is data, encrypting just takes time, maybe even a few days. You can monitor the progress in Terminal by typing...

diskutil list

In the output from this command it should show the encryption progress in percentage. Be patient. As I said, it might take a day or more to complete.
Oh! I see. I will leave it overnight tonight. However, why did it mount back up unencrypted? Also, why doesn't it show an option to encrypt Blue 1?

Thank you sincerely for responding.
 

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,445
9,317
It might not yet be complete. Does the terminal command show encryption progress?

Show me the Disk Utility information for Blue 1.
 
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