filevault 2 "Unable to create boot loader partition due to the specifics of your partition map layout."

I'm also having the same problem with a Western Digital 3TB drive. (My other drives, including several 2TB Western Digitals encrypted just fine.) This is a new blank drive, 1 partition, GUID, Mac OS X extended journaled.

I also have same problem with 3TB Seagate drive. Seems like there is a problem with 4kb sectors used on 3TB disks.

You may be on to something there, but I can't find anything in the Help about it, nor in the man page for diskutil.

Is that message in the center part of the Disk Utility window, or a separate message window?

If it's separate, please post a screenshot.

If it has a question mark icon, please click that and post the Help it shows.

Pondini,

I'm executing "diskutil cs convert", and get same output as rharder shown in this thread earlier:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3222378?answerId=15791532022#15791532022

During conversion, diskutil creates EFI partition even this partition did not exist before.

There is not problem with 1TB and 2TB drives.

3TB hard drives has 4kb sectors instead of 512b.

Error message is "Unable to create boot partition bla bla".

All this comes to conclusion that problem relates to 4KB blocks.

stepa wrote:

Pondini,

I'm executing "diskutil cs convert", and get same output as rharder shown in this thread earlier:

Ah, yes, I'd missed that - was looking at the message from Disk Utility posted earlier.

During conversion, diskutil creates EFI partition even this partition did not exist before.

Yes, I believe that's required for a "core storage" volume.

All this comes to conclusion that problem relates to 4KB blocks.

Sure looks like it. I also checked a detailed post one of the other beta testers posted, and the ARS review, with no success.

Looks like it's time to involve Apple. If you (or anyone else with this situation) have AppleCare, that's the place to start.

If not, one or more of you need to file a Bug Report, per: Reporting a Problem to Apple.

I've got the exact same problem with a WD My Book Essential 3TB that I picked up yesterday for the express purpose of using as an encrypted TimeMachine drive. I've both called AppleCare and opened a ticket as well as filed a bug via ADC. AppleCare assured they'd get back to me by Wed, so fingers crossed they're at least going to acknowledge the bug.

Just bought a new 3TB Seagate Go Flex to use as an encrypted backup with Lion.. had problems encrypting the disk and then found this forum.

Bummer.

Anxious to hear if Apple fixes this issue with 3TB disks soon.

Slightly off topic, but this question came up while I was trying to encrypt the disk...

I noticed I can encrypt the disk using Disk Utility when I'm erasing the drive, but also in the Time Machine preferences. Is there a "better" place to do the ecryption (Disk Util vs. Time Mach. Prefs), and what would happen if you did both? Or could you even...

Just curious.

The main difference is, via the Time Machine preferences you can encrypt existing data (it will be done in the background). Via Disk Utility, you can only encrypt when formatting or erasing a disk.

I know everyone has different priorities, but whole disk encryption was my biggest reason for switching to Lion, and given the other Lion bugs that are biting me and that I'm giving up some important PowerPC apps, I'm going back to Snow Leopard until this is resolved.

-Rob

I have the same problem with Error: -69730: Unable to create boot loader partition due to the specifics of your partition map layout, with a USB disk Samsung 640 GB which happens to have 1k sector size.

Looks like they tested this only with 512k disks.

I'm having the same problem. Lion 10.7, Thunderbolt iMac 27", WD Elements 3TB. I guess I'll wait until 10.7.1 to see if it gets resolved, and use a cloning utility in the meantime.

I'm having the same problem. I receive "Unable to create boot loader partition due to the specifics of your partition map layout" message when trying to encrypt time machine disk via time machine system preferences. Early 2009 iMac 24", Lion 10.7, WD Elements 3TB.

I am also having this problem.

Western Digital 3TB Elements drive, right out of the box.

Does everybody have a problem with external drives?

I successfully converted two internal WD 3 TB drives with the diskutil cs convert /Volumes/MyDisk command (no encryption, did it just for testing this issue).

I also reformatted two external RAID5 systems (Mercury Elite Pro Qx2) with Disk Utility to encrypted drives. One of the boxes contains 4x 2TB WD drives, and the other 4x 3TB WD drives. Both are connected with eSATA to my Mac Pro.

@boli That's an interesting twist. You were able to convert 3TB drives connected with eSATA.

It failed for me with FireWire 800, and I see from at least one other screenshot that someone had a failure with a USB connection.

-Rob

(back in Snow Leopard. Sigh)