Time Machine (Encrypted) Not Auto-Mounting on Boot with 10.14.4

sorry I replied to VIKINGWORRIER by mistake - see my above reply to your message.

Hi. I have upgraded to Mojave 10.14.5 and am still having this issue. In fact it only started for me after the 14.5 update.

Any advice on how to resolve this?

One observation I want to add, that the pop-up for the disk encryption password eventually pops up on its own within about an hour. I usually use Disk Utility to mount the Time Machine disk on my MacBook, but sometimes I forget, and I eventually get the pop-up.

I think the case here is for users who don't store the encryption passphrase in the keychain. That's the case for me. I want to be prompted for the passphrase after I boot up. That's what's missing. I have to start up the Disk Utility, manually mount the Time Machine disk, and then it prompts me for the passphrase.

I just want to again add an observation, that if I forget to manually mount the encrypted Time Machine, I eventually get prompted for the passphrase, on the order of an hour after the system comes up. So, in a sense, it does "automount" and prompt me for the passphrase, but after a long delay. :-)

Well, crap. Looks like this is wider spread than I thought.

I'm in the process of decrypting the drive now to see if that works. I hope Apple acknowledges this soon (or at all?). Looks like we'll have to create a script to mount the disk or create an fstab file.

I have to log on with my password to open my session. Once I'm in, I can mount the drive via Disk Utility without a password (Right-click + Mount). No prompt for a password, but as I said, it's the same password for both my account & my encrypted drive. So probably a normal behavior at this point.

I haven't tried changing my account password and try mounting the drive again. I'll give it a try soon and will post any update.

Apple called me about this. They've acknowledged that it's a bug and they acknowledged that they can reproduce it internally.

The agent had me repro it on my machine so he could collect additional logs in order to help ensure that the fix Apple develops will cover my configuration as well.

The agent didn't commit to a specific release, but acknowledged that it was not an intentional change and that we should expect a future release of macOS to carry a fix. He also said that leaving the drive unencrypted was the best workaround for now, if it's practical to do so. Otherwise, backup integrity should not be affected by continuing to mount the drive manually under 10.14.4.

Add me to the list as well, I also sent a bug report to Apple. After upgrading to 10.14.4 none of my encrypted drives will auto-mount at start up. Too confirm it is an OS issue and not hardware I even put 2 different drives into a LaCie 2-Big Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that were no encrypted. At startup they are both mounted, so I then encrypted one. Once that was done I restarted the iMac and sure enough the encrypted drive will not auto mount. I then connected the enclosure to a MacBook running 10.14.3 and there is no issues auto-mounting the encrypted drive at start up. I tested 2 different enclosures that have encrypted drives as well as USB flash drives that are encrypted. If I reset SMC once on the iMac, at boot the drives will auto-mount but after a restart they will not mount again, have to resort to going manual. This was tested using an iMac Pro and 2015 MacBook Pro.

This is helpful, but people who decide to do this need to be aware that their disk password will be stored in plain text in the script file. They might want to obfuscate the purpose of the script by naming it something non-obvious, like "Check Scores."

Personally, I found that I don't need to unlock the disk first, even though it's encrypted. Somehow it gets unlocked but not mounted. So I modified the script as follows:

delay 15
do shell script "diskutil mount [disk#]"

Get the [disk#] from step 3 above and replace [disk#] with it; it's the first entry under "Logical Volume," listed as "Disk:".

This is what my machine does, too. An hour or so after turning the machine on I get a prompt to enter the password. And after entering the password the drive mounts. (My password is not stored in Keychain.)

Yes , thanks , all disks now auto-mounting after 10.14.5 for almost the first time since 10.14.4 ( and the brush off from apple support blaming the problem on the modified mac-mini i was tricked into buying , and , saying I needed to factory reset to fix the issue......??!!)

[ ART SLIDESHOWS (inc. xxx art slideshows) 50% off sale now on ; catalogues available from tonyandtita2015@icloud.com ]

It has worked once since 10.14.5, hopefully that means it is fixed.

I use an Apple Time Machine to backup. The issue, as observed through disk utility was

• Timemachine disk didn't mount when it was powered up (or at reboot already powered up)
• Once backup preparation started it did mount but then for some reason dismounted
• An error explained that the disk could not be mounted
• My Time Machine isn't encrypted and has no password, so different from most other posts.
• Behaviour looked similar under 10.14.5 but this time the disk stayed mounted and the backup was successful.
• So it looks as though Apple has identified the problem (though not admitting what it was despite sending numerous customers looking for red herrings up their garden paths to mix a few metaphors...)
• Happy that it appears to be fixed, or at least no longer broken.

@Seydlitz, I was having this issue up through 10.14.4 but 10.14.5 fixed it. It was totally a MacOS issue.

but - when the drive would not mount automatically, I was able to manually mount my drive and run Disk Utility diagnostics.

your problem sounds like a defective hard drive or USB port.

See if you can mount it on a different (mac) computer.

Does not work in my case.