APFS Encrypted external drive no longer appearing

Question

Level 1

8 points

APFS Encrypted external drive no longer appearing

Hi,

Hoping someone can help me with this one as I'm stumped.

I have a nice LaCie 6TB external drive that was formatted as APFS encrypted. Went home one evening and came back to it not being mounted on my iMac.

Now the physical disk seems fine as per Disk Utility output upon running first aid:

However the volume (or container?) seems to be broken:

Repairing storage system

Performing fsck_apfs -y -x /dev/disk2s2

error: object (oid 0x1): o_cksum (0x78ccdb36838676d1) is invalid for object

Checking volume.

Checking the container superblock.

Checking the EFI jumpstart record.

Checking the space manager.

Checking the object map.

Checking the APFS volume superblock.

Checking the object map.

error: /dev/disk3s1 is not encrypted

The volume /dev/disk2s2 could not be verified completely.

Storage system check exit code is 78.

Storage system verify or repair failed.

Operation failed…

I'm now not sure what to do. I'm happy enough to type in the terminal to try and resolve this. So any advice would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks so much!

James

iMac 27", macOS 10.13

Posted on Apr 9, 2019 3:50 AM

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Answer 1

Apr 11, 2019 7:52 PM in response to JamesRoseUK

Run DriveDX to check the health of the hard drive to make sure it is not failing. You will need to install this special USB driver so DriveDX can communicate with the USB drive. Feel free to post a screenshot or report of all the "Health Indicators" for the Lacie drive.

If the drive is healthy and Disk Utility is unable to fix the filesystem, then I think you will need to try a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers. AFAIK there are no useful utilities out there which can repair APFS volumes at this time.

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Answer 2

fuzzymo

Level 4

2,054 points

Apr 9, 2019 6:26 AM in response to JamesRoseUK

This is just a thought and may not be worth anything and you have probably already done this. Have you tried shutting your Mac down, and unplugging the drive. Then restart your Mac, then plugging the drive back in to see if it will ask for your encryption password.

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

251,329 points

Apr 10, 2019 9:53 AM in response to JamesRoseUK

See 2& 3 here...

https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/repair-corrupt-mac-hfs-solid-state-drive/

Maybe???

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/336223/how-to-fix-my-corrupted-apfs-container

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Answer 4

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,366 points

Apr 9, 2019 6:20 PM in response to JamesRoseUK

Just reformat it.

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Answer 5

JamesRoseUK Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 9, 2019 4:42 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney, as a preventative measure for next time this might be useful. But for now I just have a nice paper weight.

Do you have any advice as what to do next to repair the existing APS encrypted volume?

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Answer 6

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,366 points

Apr 12, 2019 4:23 AM in response to JamesRoseUK

Barney, That's not the most helpful response. Unless you can give me anymore insight into this?

Select the Drive and click the Erase button. Choose MacOS Extended (Journaled) as the format.

You somehow managed to format it as APFS, so i figured you knew how.

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Answer 7

JamesRoseUK Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 12, 2019 6:34 AM in response to HWTech

Thanks for the links, I gave DriveDX a run and these were the positive results:

I guess based on that I might need to contact a specialist if I can't fix the partition considering the drive itself is ok.

Thank you for your help.

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Answer 8

Apr 12, 2019 7:11 AM in response to JamesRoseUK

At least the good news is the drive appears healthy so you are only dealing with a filesystem issue. However, at this time there are no good third party filesystem utilities which can handle APFS repairs since the filesystem is so new and undocumented.

Good luck.

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