Can't boot Lion after FileVault and Bootcamp - HELP!

FileVault 2 has caused me no end of troubles and I recommend steering well clear. The first time it ate my disk, I blamed it (mistakenly) on a bad Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade.

With a fresh Lion install on a freshly formatted disk that Disk Utility confirms is clean, and runs for weeks, activating FileVault 2 encrypts the disk, but a shutdown and restart leaves the system in exactly the state you describe. No extra partitions, Windows, or boot camp required.

Option-R brings up the recovery, but even with your master decode key provided by FileVault, the disk is corrupted. The error looks like:

LV {guid} uses blocks claimed by LV {guid}

Unable to bootstrap transaction group {number}: malformed B-Tree, block usage conflict

No valid commit checkpoint found

The volume {guid} was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.

Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting

Error: Storage system verify or repair failed.

Note -- Command-V does show the kernel trying to boot, which means the disk was decrypted, but the contents on the decrypted volume are messed up.

Hi,

I expirianced the same thing. I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion. For that I desencrypted the disc. I used PGP desktop before. After upgrading everything looked fine. After activating the FireVault I could not log in on the folwing reboot. The master key didn't work either. Only deleting the hard disc completely and restoring from backup (what took something like 10 hours) got me back.

Now I'm a bit reluctant to try that again.

Does anyone know if that problem had been corrected or will there be a fix soon. My company requires a disc encryption as a standard savety measure. PGP is no longer an option as it does not support Lion yet.

Any ideas??

Axel

There's is always legacy FileVault. As long as you remember to log out so Time machine will back it up...

I have another data point for you... I had a previous Macbook Pro (late 2010) with Snow Leopard, that I installed PGP Whole Disk Encryption on. PGP caused a kernel panic and ate my disk during encryption and left the machine unbootable. I managed to decrypt it, but couldn't get it to boot. The Apple Store was able to get the machine to boot, but by that time I already had a new machine, as I really need my laptop to work. I thought it had hardware problems with the drive. Anyhow, I restored a full system backup from Time Machine onto the new 2011 Macbook Pro. I was bitten by whole disk encryption, so after upgrading to Lion, I opted not to encrypt. However, it is actually a requirement for my machine to be encrypted, so I finally got around to trying it again, this time with FileVault 2. Everything was smooth sailing until the first reboot, at which point I get the 'Ghost Busters' symbol at boot. Now, I used to work for a company, making a full-disk encryption product and I know full well how bad these things can go. But really, there is nothing special about this install. No anti-virus to fight with. No special kernel extensions to cause problems at the drive level, at least that I am currently aware of... I can fully re-produce the issue, simply by doing Command-R, unencrypting, then repairing the volume. All is well at this point. And given this, I can probably even report the exact corruption that is occurring. My guess: there is some legacy that ended up on this new system from the old PGP WDE install from the Time Machine restore. I have long since deleted (as best as I could figure out how) the old PGP WDE and NEVER have enabled it on this new system. BTW: the new FileVault 2 pre-boot screen totally rocks the EFI -- way nicer than the PGP EFI pre-boot. Take it from me, that wasn't easy for them to write. But this problem really shouldn't be happening. I'm guessing a legacy filter driver (as I would have called it in the Windows world) from the old PGP is perhaps causing the Apple encryption drivers some problems. Ok, so just going through this post has turned into a bit of a thought exercise and I've done some debugging... If you do a 'kextstat | grep -v com.apple' and see a com.pgp.somePGPdriverHere, go ahead and 'sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/PGPwde.kext', but ONLY do this if you KNOW you are not actually encrypted. ;-) Then do a reboot. With the driver gone, I am able to successfully encrypt using FileVault 2. Apple: Would it be too much trouble to look for other third party WDE drivers before allowing enablement of FileVault 2? It's not obvious to a typical user that their machine has some crappy driver laying around that isn't being used... Problem solved here, at least for the PGP case that manifests these symptoms...

I have the same problem as described in the first post. The issue occured after force-powering-off my Macbook Pro 2011 while the filevault protected harddisk was busy reading/writing some data.

After that my Macbook wouldn't boot nomore but showing the prohibition sign instead. Booting in recovery mode still works but when I try to repair the harddrive I get the "chksum mismatch" error.

Well, there seems to be no other way than reformatting the drive and reinstalling OSX. However, there is some very important data on that drive and I must not loose it. Unfortunately I have never done any backups before the error occured.

So now I wonder if doing a backup (using diskutil in recovery mode) in that corrupted state could be of any use. Maybe I can mount it on a new OSX installation? (I do have the password and the recovery key)

Is there any way to "rescue" the data on the encrypted image even if the filesystem is corrupted, maybe using 3rd party software?

Hi - I have exactly the same problem. Ever since I encrypted my disk I have to use the ALT to select my MacOS partition to boot from - otherwise I receive an error.

Why is this?

ps - brand new MBP (three weeks old), restored from Time Machine and then encrypt the disk.

No, your problem is different and has nothing to do with the issue discussed here. Fortunately, it may easily be fixed (while my disk seems to be unrepairable and my data is lost...).

Have you tried changing the default startup volume in system prefs? Also you can try fixing this problem using the DiskUtility tool that comes with OSX.

Please avoid using FileVault unless really nescessary - disk encryption comes with many risks. If you still feel disk encryption is nescessary make sure to backup your data.

Sorry for not letting you know right away …

Thank you daveman1010220! Your hint helped perfectly! When I did what you described from that moment everything worked just fine!

I’m always impressed how resourceful and helpful the posts/people are in these kind of forums.

Thanks again, Axel

Hi ixylon,

I am having the same problem with my mac and I really need the data on it and can not afford data recovery services. Let me know what happened with you and if you have any suggestions that would br very helpful. Thanks in advance.

Hi biotechlogic,

I'm sorry to tell you I didn't find a solution for my problem and had to reinstall Lion loosing all my data. Since this data was of great importance for me and my team I spent many hours searching the Internet for possible solutions. At that time - this incident happened one year ago - I wasn't able to find anything helpful. There were some people explaining how to repair a corrupt Filevault 1 but no hints for Filevault 2 as this technology was much newer. Too bad apple always keeps such things a secret otherwise there might have been some smart people figuring out how to fix Filevault 2.

I came to the conclusion there must be some sort of algorithm on your hard disk which decrypts the main drive and this is what had been damaged so the drive cannot be decrypted no more. The solution would be to replace this damaged algorithm with a new copy. For this you would have to find out where it is stored, where to get a working copy and after all how to replace it. That can't be easy at all but neither impossible =)

If you're very serious about your data do some serious searching on the Internet, maybe you can find the required information. Or maybe somebody else had exactly the same problem and got it fixed? Maybe somebody came up with a much simpler approach? Remember this happened one year ago to me and now it happened to you. For sure we're not the only ones with that problem!

Please, if you can find a solution, make sure to post it here as it would be a great help for people with the same problem.

Btw, on my new installation I've never turned on Filevault again and use a TM backup. Next week I'm gonna replace my HDD by a SSD with has a built in 256 bit AES Encryption and renders Filevault redundant.

Also I'm working for a data recovery company now and yes, data recoveries can be quite expensive and I'm afraid these companies cannot find a solution either. But it won't hurt to give it a try, some companies (like mine) offer a free diagnosis. If you life in Germany try my company - we're one of Germany's best =) (we're called data recovery)

I did the same thing, I installed windows but then shortly after removed it then repartitioned the drive.

Now my Mac doesn't start up but shows the prohibitory sign.

Did you find a solution?

i have this problem since enabling filevault - wont boot up in ANY mode - recover, verbose, safe etc 😟