Can't turn on FileVault on Lion after clean install

I initially had the same problem as described here, with the same suspicious "vol_header 0 at 0 invalid checksum" log message. I retried FileVault after the 10.7.2 update and it failed the same way. Then I tried something else: I initiated FileVault as usual via System Preferences. When my Mac (MacPro1,1) first rebooted, I held Cmd-R pressed to boot into the recovery system. There, I fired up Disk Utility, selected my (only) harddrive and clicked the repair button. Then I rebooted out of the recovery system. The Mac rebooted, showed the early logon screen and the system came up with FileVault enabled and is now encrypting along.

This has solved my problem

Thanks

I also encountered this problem while trying to create an encrypted disk from within Disk Utility (for Time Machine backups). Disk Utility successfully converted the disk to the LVM format but when trying to mount the logical volume it always failed with a disk I/O error:

Oct 16 11:23:06 ... kernel[0]: CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "TMJ" (913D768B-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-3AFD8E153C0E), pv 71CF0A54-XXX-XXX-XXX-B3AF2C654EF3, near LV byte offset = 0.

Oct 16 11:23:06 ... kernel[0]: disk3: I/O error.

First I thought the disk is simply damaged, but the I/O error only occurred when trying to format the disk with encryption - a normal HFS+ Journaled formatting succeeded fine.

So I tried a different (smaller) disk - and Disk Utility was successful in formatting that with encryption - everything worked fine.

So I tried the following: I opened both cases and swapped the drives. I then tried to format the disk that had made problems (the bigger) with the controller of the other disk (the smaller one) - and it worked fine: I was able to now also format the bigger disk in encrypted format using Disk Utility.

Don't ask my why but it seems that the controller in the bigger disk's original case is somehow incompatible with Mac OS's LVM mechanism...

This worked for me. I hadn't tried it again since 10.7.0, and didn't try it without the fix, but it's definitely working now. Disk Utility didn't look like it reported any errors, but the volume didn't show up as an encrypted volume until after I repaired the host disk.

Hey, all.

Many years later, I find myself coming to this thread. The other day, my MacBook4,1 (6GB RAM and 960GB Crucial M500 SSD) kernel panicked and forced me to press the power button to restart. This was on my system that already had FileVault enabled. The subsequent reboot presented with the pre-login unlock screen, but no password field.

Cmd-R brought up the Recovery mode and Disk Utility found no errors. Simply put, I could not login. I booted to a Lion USB installer, wiped the SSD completely, did a fresh install of Lion and then restored from Time Machine backup. And now I see the same error:

CoreStorage: read_volume_headers: vol_header 0 at 0 invalid checksum

System diagnostics comes up clean. SMART testing the drive also clean. No I/O errors of any sort. And since Lion is no longer supported by Apple, no new updates or kernel extensions. I'm at a loss. It may be a pre-failure condition in one or more pieces of hardware. This is an old box. I guess it's getting to be time to upgrade.

The lack of encryption is an issue though; I carry an awful lot of sensitive client data with me due to the nature of my work. Being unable to encrypt the drive is a serious concern.

Trane Francks wrote:

Hey, all.

Many years later, I find myself coming to this thread. The other day, my MacBook4,1 (6GB RAM and 960GB Crucial M500 SSD) kernel panicked and forced me to press the power button to restart. This was on my system that already had FileVault enabled. The subsequent reboot presented with the pre-login unlock screen, but no password field.

Cmd-R brought up the Recovery mode and Disk Utility found no errors. Simply put, I could not login. I booted to a Lion USB installer, wiped the SSD completely, did a fresh install of Lion and then restored from Time Machine backup. And now I see the same error:

CoreStorage: read_volume_headers: vol_header 0 at 0 invalid checksum

System diagnostics comes up clean. SMART testing the drive also clean. No I/O errors of any sort. And since Lion is no longer supported by Apple, no new updates or kernel extensions. I'm at a loss. It may be a pre-failure condition in one or more pieces of hardware. This is an old box. I guess it's getting to be time to upgrade.

The lack of encryption is an issue though; I carry an awful lot of sensitive client data with me due to the nature of my work. Being unable to encrypt the drive is a serious concern.

In the end, this was a case of OS corruption. Subsequent to this issue, putting apps fullscreen caused kernel panics. I have no idea what the initial cause of the trouble was, but a clean install and a profile migration fixed the issue where a full-system restore did not. Apparently, I had backed up the corrupted OS components and restored the problem along with everything else. The clean install fixed things.

Running OS X 10.7.5 with all updates, OS X bash update 1.0 and custom-compiled NTP 4.2.8. FileVault is enabled and Time Machine is pruning stale backups to make space for a new 800 GB backup. Life is good once again.