Disk Utility Errors for APFS

Terry, not that it will help to solve your problem directly, but I am seeing this same warning, and perhaps my details will be a hint as to how to solve this problem, eventually.

In my case, I was running a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of one external USB drive to another external USB drive, and accidentally unplugged the cable leading to the dock that contained the two drives during the backup. Bad move: this killed the backup, of course, but worse: After that, I was no longer able to access those two drives. I can see the drives in the Disk Utility application and from diskutil and fsck_apfs on the command line, but I cannot repair the volumes or mount them. I can add volumes to the container, but not access the container that has my data. fsck_aps from recovery mode, another boot disk, or from single user mode gives the invalid dstream error. This seems to have something to do with disk encryption, but command line things intended to decrypt did not work for me either. After many hours of working on this, I am giving up until some other clue arises or somebody updates their disk repair utility to be able to address this. Maybe a future version of Disk Utility, maybe Disk Warrior (cannot deal with apfs yet). So right now I have lost 1TB of data. My fault, of course, for adopting a new file system so early, and for converting my external spinning hard drives to apfs so early on. On the other hand, I feel that Apple might have put apfs out there just a teensy bit half-baked.

One strange thing that MIGHT be a clue: on bootup, the system asks for the disk encryption password for each of the two external USB drives, and it always asks twice for each one, but does not mount them. This does not have to do with USB as a connection method, since it happens when I put the drives in an external thunderbolt box as well.

Having a similar problem except that mine started when I closed the lid to my MacBook Air one night and woke up to a black screen the next morning. Realized later that my Air was trying to boot into an installer—the 10.13 supplemental update installer. I tried redownloading the update both from the App Store and manually from Apple Support, but my Air still stalls around 20% on the progress bar during reboot. It will go to sleep it sits there so long, but will wake up if a key is pressed. At least I can chooses to boot into my startup disk and use my computer though.

This whole thing prompted me to figure out why my Air is having so much trouble which lead me to this thread. It also led me to another thread that indicated that the update is having difficulty because the disk is encrypted. I have tried turning off FileVault, but it would seem that APFS doesn’t allow that change to be made in its current implementation so the Turn-Off button is permanently greyed out. I tried decryption through Terminal with ‘diskutil’ and ‘fdesetup’ just for kicks, but still could not. Anything I do in regard to assessing the disk either through Disk Utility or through Terminal is either really slow or causes the system to hang (mouse still works, but nothing is interactable). I realize this is probably because the disk is “locked” in these cases to perform their tasks, but the tasks never finish even after waiting for hours. When I can actually get FirstAid to run on Macintosh HD, I also see ‘warning: invalid dstream.default_crypto_id (0x0) for encrypted volume given apfs_fs_flags (0x8)’. There’s something wrong with a stream of data and my assumption is that it has something to do with the update... perhaps having difficulty because the update doesn’t have authority to apply itself when used on an encrypted disk??? Have you placed an official bug report? I’m going to, just haven’t gotten around to it, yet.

I had exactly the same problem on my Mid 2013 MB Air, which appeared after I installed the security update 2017-001 on Nov 30. I noticed some hang issues when booting up, either a full start up from completely turned off, or a boot from sleep. The whole boot process could take ages, and after boot up, the MB Air could be very slow and unresponsive, and the fan could start running at very high rpm's.

I got exactly the same error messages when running Disk Utility (about 4 to 6 identical error messages at different instances during a full First Aid pass in Disk Utility).

I have now managed to get rid of all error messages and the MB Air behaves totally normally again. Don't know if my method is relevant for you, but what I did was to remove the File Vault disc encryption. It took overnight to decrypt the entire disc, but after it was completed, everything works perfectly fine again and no error messages from First Aid in Disk Utility!

I will let the MB Air run a couple of days, and possibly wait until the next OS X update from Apple, before I turn on FileVault again.

If you are indeed using FileVault, it may be worthwhile to try the above approach and see if it rectifies the issue.

Good luck!

Thanks for trying to help me out. Instead of turning off encryption of the File Vault, I have reinstalled the operating system, because it is much faster to do this. I also always rebooted first in Safe Mode. The first time I did during the reinstallation, I noticed File Vault was turned off, but I am not sure if I was responsible for turning it off or not.

In any case, without having to encrypt the hard disk again, but just by reinstalling the operating system, all disk errors have gone when I did First Aid now in or outside Safe Mode booting.

I hope this is useful to those of us with this problem. It seems strange that any update to the operating system will trigger disk errors if the hard disk is encrypted. This did not happen before the advent of the latest operating system for MacBooks Pro.

Thanks Justin. It turned out that turning off FileVault encryption didn't do the job for me either. The error messages were gone, but my Mac was getting more and more prone to hang. Last night, it was no longer possible to boot in normal mode. I did a reboot in Safe Mode and reinstalled the OS, after which all appears to be working normally again.

It sure is strange that last weeks OS update appears to have triggered all these disk error issues. Given the way the root account security flaw became an urgent issue to resolve for Apple, it seems like the fix and subsequent update may have been slightly rushed out the door. It is the first time that I have suffered system and disk stability issues directly after installing an update to OS-X.

Not sure how threading works on this list, so I am responding to my own post...

Yesterday, Apple released system 10.13.2 and now I can access my 4TB disks that were munged previously. I have not had time to check out these disks completely, but I was able to copy all of my data (approx 1TB) off of one of them. When I first connected this drive following the 10.13.2 update, there was considerable disk activity, indicating that the system may have been doing some kind of repair. Seems so.

I turned off the MacBook file vault encryption, redownloaded the 10.13.2 High Sierra operating system by pressing command+option+R, booted first in Safe Mode before completing the installation of the operating system. After checking there was no longer any disk error, I turned on the MacBook encryption again. When encryption finished, first aid no longer any revealed disk errors. It is a time-consuming process triggered as you said by the most recent update to the Apple operating system. Apple should make sure this would never happen again before releasing its next MacBook operating system update. It is unprofessional work unworthy of the world's top company with the most cash reserves.

I have this issue too. My APFS partition scans just fine (without warnings) without encryption, as soon as I add encryption, the scan reveals multiple warning: invalid dstream.default_crypto_id (0x0) for encrypted volume, given apfs_fs_flags (0x8) messages.

Attempted reloading High Sierra, but the problem persists. Only other thing I can think of is a complete erase and rebuild, assuming it's a glitchy OS. Will try calling local resellers. No Apple stores in my country.

Hi Ben,

I've seen some go straight through with no issues, but they all had Fusion drives. Those with HD/D, no such luck. My upgrade creeped along but I waited it out. I did a force restart after and everything was fine, but I admit, I was getting a bit impatient.

I plan to upgrade my iMac soon, so I feel sure this will help with any potential, future issues. If I weren't ugrading my Mac, and I noticed any other issues, I'd probably go back to Sierra, to be fair.

Hang in there...I noticed a couple of users had good solutions posted that may help ya out. :)

My MacBook Pro Retina has many such errors but First Aid was completed and I notice no problems using my laptop. Do these errors matter if my MacBook is functioning perfectly apparently?

This appears to be a problem that isn't going away. Most frustrating to see that it has lingered for some time now. Has Apple issued a fix?

what is the solution to this problem? Reinstall the system?

Btw, a reinstall couldn't hurt. I'd give it a try.

I returned to the previous backup