time machine restore breaks file vault

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time machine restore breaks file vault

Running Lion GM for the last few weeks on 2011 MBP w/500 GB drive. Decided to upgrade my drive to 750 GB and used TimeMachine to restore.

Had to boot SL (since Lion update isn't bootable by default and the dmg isn't on my local laptop) to launch the full TM restore.

TM had no problem restoring and everything worked fine until I tried to encrypt using File Vault. This was working on my 500GB drive.

When I try to enable, I get the following error:

FileVault can’t be turned on for the disk “Macintosh HD”.

Some disk formats don’t support the recovery partition required by encryption. To use encryption, reinstall this version of Mac OS X on a reformatted disk.

The format I used when I created the disk was Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

After realizing I couldn't encrypt, I tried the command-R to boot the recovery partition and its gone.

So how do we do a TM restore for Lion to a clean disk?

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 8G RAM, 500G HD, i7 sandy bridge

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 7:24 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 27, 2011 12:13 AM in response to MickeyPhelps

I too am having the exact same issue, so i hope with a little help i could get this moving in the right direction, staying encrypted that is.

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Answer 2

MickeyPhelps Author

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Jul 27, 2011 8:49 AM in response to RednecXSwaggeR

OK - here's what I did to "fix" it and here's what I think actually works.

What I had to do to Fix the problem was to create a bootable Lion image/DVD. Go to your Lion download, right click, and Examine Contents. Go to SharedSupport and copy out the InstallESD.dmg file. From this, you can burn a DVD or use DiskUtility and restore it as an image to an external drive.

With this image, I had to re-install Lion completely then use the TimeMachine restore option from a fully installed Lion. I tried just using the TimeMachine restore from the boot image, but since I'd already backed up my production machine with no Repair partition/file system, it wasn't available for my Lion Boot image to restore to.

I haven't tried yet, but my guess is that this new Lion Boot image will properly restore a time machine backup to a blank disk... as long as the time machine image was good when it started.

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Answer 3

Jul 31, 2011 7:05 PM in response to MickeyPhelps

Thanks I'll have to try that sometime this upcoming weekend, since I do have the InstallESD.dmg file dvd. I'll get back with you then, but it sounds like the best functioning solution I've heard.

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Answer 4

MickeyPhelps Author

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Aug 5, 2011 10:54 AM in response to MickeyPhelps

FYI - I replaced my 7200 RPM with an SSD (oooh yea baby - screamin' fast!) and used Time Machine restore from a Lion Install Boot Image. Selected the restore from time machine option and it did NOT restore the repair partition - option-R did NOT work and I could not encrypt the drive.

So - if you want to restore lion to a fresh drive, do NOT use the time machine restore on the boot image!

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Answer 5

akthor

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Aug 14, 2011 6:50 PM in response to MickeyPhelps

My situation is slightly different, I deleted my Boot Camp partition and resized my OS X partition to take the newly freed space on the drive. This required me to turn off encryption and then resize my partition. Now that it is time to turn it back on I get the same symptoms as described by MickeyPhelps. Thanks for the fix, but there must be a quicker way, right Apple?

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Answer 6

Varta

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Sep 9, 2011 12:28 PM in response to MickeyPhelps

This is how I fixed it on a Macbook Air 2011 (MBA). I couldn't use the MickeyPhelps procedure here, because for the the MBA there is no way to create an installer image.

The procedure assumes you have a WiFi or Ethernet connection to the internet.

1. Restore your Time Machine backup. This will invalidate recovery HD, FileVault is gone and cannot be enabled (see original post).

2. Boot to recovery mode using CMD-R. The MBA will load the recovery partition data from the network.

3. Use the Disk Utility to create an image backup of the system partition (Macintosh HD) on an external drive

4. Boot using Option-CMD-P-R to reset PRAM. Not sure if this is always required, but for me it was. Otherwise I got an error that OSX could not be installed because recovery HD could not be created by the installer.

5. Boot to recovery mode using CMD-R. The MBA will load the recovery partition data from the network.

6. Using Disk Utility, first delete the "Macintosh HD" partition, then re-create it. Not sure if this is really necessary, but I did it this way.

7. Re-Install Mac OSX Lion. (takes a couple of hours depending on your network)

8. Omit the OSX configuration and boot using CMD-R. Should be fast because recovery HD has already been recreated.

9. Use the Disk Utility to restore the subsequently created image backup to the system partition (Macintosh HD) from the external drive.

10. Boot. That's it. You can now turn on FileVault.

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Answer 7

Nov 26, 2011 2:56 PM in response to Varta

Apple support gave me multiple solutions for this and I started top down meaning

least effort first.

After restoring my last TM backup to a completely empty disk, I could not enable File Vault

I re-installed Lion from the update file that was copied to my workstation some months ago

and also backuped in TM.

After installation and performing all remaining updates 10.7.2 and

Thunderbolt etc. I could enable File Vault again. Although it took about 1hr or so it saved me

a lot time as one of Apple support instruction was to completely wipe the system and

do a fresh install of Leopard and update to Lion etc..

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Answer 8

Feb 2, 2012 4:34 PM in response to akthor

akthor wrote:

My situation is slightly different, I deleted my Boot Camp partition and resized my OS X partition to take the newly freed space on the drive. This required me to turn off encryption and then resize my partition. Now that it is time to turn it back on I get the same symptoms as described by MickeyPhelps. Thanks for the fix, but there must be a quicker way, right Apple?

Yeah, I had to use diskutil. Here's what to do folks:

diskutil coreStorage convert [IDENTIFIER] -passphrase [passphrase]

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Answer 9

akthor

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Feb 3, 2012 11:31 PM in response to carrioncrawler

Brilliant, this worked perfectly for me. Thank you carrioncrawler!

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Answer 10

Mar 2, 2012 5:06 PM in response to carrioncrawler

I'm having the same problem, but I've only seldom used diskutil commands. What exactly does this one do?

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Answer 11

Mar 3, 2012 6:04 AM in response to julesmazur

It converts a regular Journaled HFS+ or Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+ volume (must be on a partition and within GPT partitioning scheme) into a CoreStorage logical volume and encrypts it with the specified passphrase.

man diskutil

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