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I forgot to turn off filevault before erase my hard drive

I’ll done all the preparation before trade in of my MacBook Pro but I realized I forgot to unlock and turn off my FileVault. What should I do? Can I just go ahead to send the trade in kit?

Posted on Sep 28, 2019 11:22 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 28, 2019 11:52 AM

If you are providing the Admin password, it's a don't care.


They will re-install whatever they want to have on it. That would be slightly easier if you did a new ERASE of the ENTIRE Device, by immutable device-name (not just the MacOS Volume) taking care to turn OFF FileVault, and then did a new Install.


What you should NOT do is:

Disable FileVault.

Changing the setting takes only a moment. However every block on the disk must be read using on-the-fly decryption, then re-written without encryption. It can literally take days.

5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 28, 2019 11:52 AM in response to xiaoya93

If you are providing the Admin password, it's a don't care.


They will re-install whatever they want to have on it. That would be slightly easier if you did a new ERASE of the ENTIRE Device, by immutable device-name (not just the MacOS Volume) taking care to turn OFF FileVault, and then did a new Install.


What you should NOT do is:

Disable FileVault.

Changing the setting takes only a moment. However every block on the disk must be read using on-the-fly decryption, then re-written without encryption. It can literally take days.

I forgot to turn off filevault before erase my hard drive

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