Lion, Utility disk crash

I have the same problem. I create three partitions and then attempt to change each of them to encrypted. The first one typcially works fine, but then Disk Utility crashes when attempting to encrypt the other two partitions (and oftern changes the number of partitions and partition sizes). I would appreciate any suggestions on how to get a drive formated with three encrypted partitions that will be usable in Lion.

Disk utility on Lion is crashing for me when I try to initialize/erase a new encrypted (journaled) volume. After a few tries it will eventually succeed, but not without a few crashes first. It also happened when I configured TimeMachine to encrypt backups.

Exact same problem here.

Please help!

I have the same problem also. However it seems to crash at the stage it is trying to mount the new volume after creating it. So even after the crash the volume appears to have been created and verifies fine. I have a couple of Time Machine backups running off a crashed creation process but they work fine.

Looks like a bug during the volume trying to automount it after creation is my feeling.

I am having the same issue using Lion 10.7.2 and an external hard drive.

My external hard drive is a WD 1Tb Caviar Black mounted in a Voyager Q connected to my Mac Pro using Firewire 800. Previously it was formatted as two 500Gb Mac OS Extended Journaled partitions, but NOT encrypted. I wasn't having any problems with the disk and was cloning my 500Gb boot drive and a 500Gb partition holding VMware images to it. Everything was working fine.

I then decided that it might be better to encrypt this external drive, so I fired up Disk Utility to repartition it. I erased and recreated the forst 500Gb partition as Mac OS Extended Journaled Encrypted and that completed without any issues. I repeated the process for the second partition and Disk Utility crashed. I tried again and Disk Utility crashed again.

Tried erasing the whole disk and creating just one encrypted 1Tb partition (rather than 2 x 500Gb partitions) but the same thing happens. Disk Utility can't seem to leave the whole disk in an intact working state with encryption enabled.

I'm really glad I tried this out on an external drive first! Judging by this thread, there is some common cause that makes Disk Utility crash for some people when trying to encrypt drives. Here's hoping that Apple see this thread and investigate. (I'll send feedback to them direct as well as the crash reports).

Same thing here, only I've been trying to do this to an external USB Flash drive. It seems to be happening during the encryption phase of the new partition. Using OS X Lion 10.7.2.

Has anyone found a fix for this yet? This feature was the only reason i upgraded to Lion and now i find out i can even use it!