Re-mounting an encrypted drive.

For a test, I partitioned my primary drive to create an encrypted partition (while running from an external clone). It is an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G Media 2TB. I created an ~200 GB partition and named it Secure.

Then I unmounted the partition, to see if I could remount it. I used Disk Utility->File->Unlock, but absolutely nothing happened that I could detect.

Any suggestions?

Posted on Nov 22, 2020 1:22 PM

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4 replies

HWTech

Level 9

69,290 points

Nov 22, 2020 1:45 PM in response to Tanna Davenport

Why are you creating another partition? You should just enable Filevault on the boot drive so the whole drive is encrypted. You can still unlock the Filevaulted boot drive volume even if you boot from an external drive. Creating partitions on your boot drive is just asking for trouble since you will find yourself running out of room on one of the partitions sooner or later.

By default macOS "ejects" items when "unmounting" them which requires the item to be re-attached, but I don't know if it works this way for a partition on a boot drive. You can try using the command line "diskutil" to unmount the volume, but I think the volume will still be unlocked so when it is mounted again no password will be required to decrypt it.

diskutil  unmount  "/Volumes/Secure"

HWTech

Level 9

69,290 points

Nov 22, 2020 4:24 PM in response to Tanna Davenport

As long as the other user accounts are Standard accounts, then those users should not be able to access the data contained within your own user account even when Filevault is enabled. If the other users need to have admin privileges as well, then you can just encrypt a folder within your user folder or use an encrypted .sparsebundle image file.

Nov 22, 2020 5:01 PM in response to HWTech

I didn't know I could encrypt a folder. Really great suggestion. Thanks

Nov 22, 2020 2:33 PM in response to HWTech

I get that, but there are other users of this machine, and I wanted to have a secure place to store some sensitive stuff. Barring that, it occurs to me that all I have to do is make sure that none of the others have admin privs, create a separate user for my sensitive work and that should cover it. Even so, what I tried should have worked. Maybe a bug in El Capitan.

Thanks for the input.

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Re-mounting an encrypted drive.