FileVault failed and now I can't turn it off.

Here's what I ended up doing:

1. I re-downloaded the Lion installer, and then installed it to an external USB drive.

2. I booted the mini using the external drive, and moved the important stuff from the dying partition to another drive. (Because it was accessible, turning FileVault off did "stick" but the partition, or drive, was messed up. Because the recover partition worked just fine, I figured it was the partition that was borked.)

3. Using disk utility, I blew away the dying partition. Actually, at first I "erased" it but it still showed up as locked, so, after much trial and error, I was able to finally blow away the partition.

4. I created a fresh partition.

5. I reinstalled Lion and did basic configurations.

Basically, I blew it all away and started over. And I'm leaving FileVault off.

The good news out of all this is that I'm running regular Lion instead of server (I didn't need server), and everything seems snappier now. And I didn't lose any data.

I have seen the same thing with my 2009 MacBook Pro. I tried reformating the hard drive and reinstalling lion (from external hard drive), but the encryption still failed. Got the same error messages in the Kernel log:

Mar 17 20:47:07 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: bgt_overwrite_bad_sectors: new bad sector at logical offset 306443310080, physical offset 306443310080, length 512, errno e00002ca.

Mar 17 20:48:25 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "Macintosh HD" (14B6073F-CD10-4B43-B058-7784B6A58D7B), pv C957E0DC-035E-43DB-BE00-5E1C4B72FA3A, near LV byte offset = 306441252864.

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "Macintosh HD" (14B6073F-CD10-4B43-B058-7784B6A58D7B), pv C957E0DC-035E-43DB-BE00-5E1C4B72FA3A, near LV byte offset = 306441342464.

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: bgt_single_io_read: error e00002ca while trying to read 512 bytes at offset 306441342464, read 0 bytes

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: background_transform: too many IO errors, aborting!

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: bgt_single_io_read: returning 0x53

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: bgt_do_lv_io: returning 0x53

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: background encryption/decryption: read failed with 83, offset=306441252864Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: background_transform: committing transaction from error/early exit path

Mar 17 20:49:16 MacBook-Pro-2009 kernel[0]: CoreStorage: background_transform: exiting with 83

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Just wanted to ask, if there is any update? I have a MacBook late2011 with SSD. I tried to turn on FileVault but half way it crashed. A look in my kernel log brought me a lot of those IO-errors:

22.03.12 10:34:28,000 kernel: CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "System" (8EB974A2-AAA4-40BA-A36F-A3F779E5FEF0), pv 015628A5-4551-4735-B7B3-1E454995F20D, near LV byte offset = 107446185472.

22.03.12 10:34:28,000 kernel: CoreStorage: bgt_single_io_read: error e00002ca while trying to read 512 bytes at offset 107446185472, read 0 bytes

I did a fresh reinstallation of Lion. In fact I did several. I tried to turn it on with 10.7.0 and updated to 10.7.3, always the same problem.

It seems that somehow the SSD (128GB) is causing IO errors. I don't know if there is any chance to mark those "bad sectors" as you can do with a normal HDD.

Anyone got any idea??

Yup. Same problem here. Still no fix in sight other than reinstalling. I can't because the crappy superdrive on the non unibody mac will eat the disc and not read it. Possibly, I'd like to boot off USB but I don't believe this is an option. Another curse Jobs left us with.

Just reformatted the disk and tried to filevault a clean Lion install 10.7.3 install with no extra software or drivers. Just apple's updates. Failed in the middle with the same message.

Apparantely this feature, probably the last thing you'd ever want to go wrong with the OS does not work at all. Good thing software is sold without warranty or Apple would be sued out of business.

It is pretty obvious you got hardware I/O errors, and no software can fix such hardware errors. You can use Target Disk Mode to connect it to another Mac and install OS on it. But you want to make sure the drive is not fault.

HFS+ does not complain about I/O errors because HFS+ does not have checksums or anything like that (so you get silent data corruption). File Vault actually checks and makes sure you are not losing more data by enabling encryption, and that's why it refuses to finish encrypting.

It's not obvius as I ran fsck and the disk is clean. The only problems were from Filevalut messing it up after I ran it which I fixed before doing the clean install. It's a journaling file system anyways so it would recover automatically. It did on my other mac.

tl;dr: If filevalut doesn't check BEFORE encrypting leaving the system in an unusable state is terrible engineering and terrible QA on Apple's part. But then again, what else is new?

fsck_hfs does not check free blocks on the disk, but File Vault check and encrypt every sector on disk, including free blocks. When File Vault fails, is your system unbootable? All other user's problem is that their system can still use although only half of the disk is encrypted.

No after fskc'ing it it was bootable again in an unknown state. To me, that's unusable. Anyway, it's what it is. I'm not going to use this feature anymore. It's cost me days of work because of the bad engineering of such a critical feature.

Are you saying that fsck_hfs made it bootable, and before fsck_hfs, it is not booting? If yes, then you are seeing a totally different problem than others on this thread. Other people's volume are bootable and useable without using fsck.

Yes exactly. It made it bootable after running Filevalut.

> Yes exactly. It made it bootable after running Filevalut.

When it is not bootable, what do you see in your /var/log/kernel.log and /var/log/system.log?

No, fsck made it bootable after filevalut. I don't have the log anymore due to reformatting.

There are no problems reported by fsck or disk utility (off bootable usb) after the clean install and restore of the backup from the time machine. Filevault just doesn't work. C'est la vie.

I got into this trap while trying to decrypt my FileVault 2 partition. What I did to get out of it was roughly the following:

> diskutil cs list

I found my UUID in the list of Core Storage drives. It's the one listed as locked and encrypted.

> diskutil cs unlockVolume [your UUID]

Entered my FV2 password here. It gets unencrypted. The output tells you the virtual device node at which the unencrypted partition can be accessed.

Get an external drive large enough to store the unencrypted data.

Next we need to copy the decrypted data off the drive into a DMG file on the external drive.

> hdiutil create -srcdevice [the /dev/disk* mountpoint given by unlockVolume] /Volumes/[external drive name]/unencrypted.dmg

This will create a disk image of your partition on the extrenal drive. *Warning* this is unencrypted data.

That will take some time. Go grab a coffeee.

When it's done you'll need to verify the image.

> asr imagescan --source /Volumes/[external drive name]/unencrypted.dmg

That will also take some time.

It's done? Yay! Now we're going to nuke your FV2 partition. Be careful here.

Find your partition using

> diskutil list

Double check it's right!

> diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ [make up a name for the drive] /dev/[your partition]

You've now destroyed the FV2 partition and reformatted it as a vanilla Journaled HFS+ partition.

We're now gonna copy over your unencrypted data from the external drive's DMG

> asr restore --source /Volumes/[your external drive]/unencrypted.dmg --target /dev/[your partition] --erase

This will take a while. Once it's done you *should* be able to boot into your partition with no problems.

If it worked, do a secure erase of the external drive's DMG. You've now got a vanilla Lion install without FV2. I recommend backing it up now. Then you can retry enabling FV2 or leave it as-is.

Whew!