dmerr1man

Q: filevault failed: boot file not written

Just installed Mtn Lion over a clean install of Lion (following a recently corrupted drive) and I cannot enable filevault. I keep getting the message shown below.

 

screenshot.png

 

I've tried booting from the recovery partition and repairing both the disk and permissions. Still have the same issue - any ideas?

 

Thanks

Dan.

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Jul 27, 2012 3:47 PM

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Q: filevault failed: boot file not written

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  • by dmerr1man,Helpful

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 28, 2012 8:08 AM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 28, 2012 8:08 AM in response to dmerr1man

    Have put a call into Apple help, been referred to 2nd line. Will keep this thread up to date ;o)

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 29, 2012 3:04 PM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 29, 2012 3:04 PM in response to dmerr1man

    The promised before 5:30pm call back never happened...thanks for that Apple support :o(

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 30, 2012 5:07 AM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 30, 2012 5:07 AM in response to dmerr1man

    Finally got the call to say "...sorry, engineering have not yet responded..."

  • by magnamentis,

    magnamentis magnamentis Jul 30, 2012 9:05 AM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 30, 2012 9:05 AM in response to dmerr1man

    hi dan, same on this side, i suspect that we shall have to format the drive and start from scratch but hope dies last and thus i'm looking forward to what apple will have to say to you inquiry :-)  just wondering whether you ever have installed from a bootable backup before as i did for decades now, means i took my old mac or a clone of it and just cloned that machine to the new machine. as mentioned i did that for years and for all my friends and customers since it was a very quick an easy way to change machines. now i'm wondering whether there might be a similarity on your side because that way of changing machines has definitely gone with mountain lion and with the latest machinery. however thanks for cleaning the path here for this issue, one would not believe it but this is the first ever that i found absolutely nothing on the web, not mountain lion and not for older systems. basically this is one of the reason why i suspect  a connection to this new, more restrective handling of system and content transfer. good luck to both of us then :-)

     

    ingo

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 31, 2012 6:51 AM in response to magnamentis
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    Jul 31, 2012 6:51 AM in response to magnamentis

    Yeah, I am fully expecting to have to flatten the machine once more. I've resisted fully installing stuff for that very reason.

     

    The machine was bought with SL pre-installed and both L and ML were bought through the app store. L went on OK but ML seems quite buggy in comparison. In addition to the significant problem above (can't use filevault) I keep getting warnings about USB drives being improperly disconnected whenever the Mac sleeps. Grrr!

     

    Good luck indeed ;o)

     

    D

  • by magnamentis,

    magnamentis magnamentis Jul 31, 2012 7:08 AM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 31, 2012 7:08 AM in response to dmerr1man

    well there are as usual a few bugs

     

    most of the bugs i experience, except the one in question here. are very special like mail in an encrypted folder does not work anymore, that's basically why I have to turn on file vault which i was for good reason always reluctant to do before.

     

    i tried filevault several times before and sooner or later came across trouble which made me to opt for the sparsbundle option instead.

     

    however to be fair i must say that compared to earlier major system updates lion as well as mountain lion are running quite well, i'm for 22 years with apple now and believe me, i have seen much buggier updatetes than these last too but none as catastrophic as our friends using early windows versions :-)

     

    and if not for business reasons ( consulting ) i would always wait for version x.2 at least. i usually do the immediate update to be ready for my clients's inquiries which includes experiencing some trouble to have solutions at hand :-)

     

    so let's see what appel is coming up with, thanks for the reply and obviously we share the expectation, albeit with reluctance, to format the drive and having to re-install the whole machine after that which is so time consuming.

     

    best regards and the luck to share :-)

     

    ingo

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 31, 2012 9:19 AM in response to magnamentis
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    Jul 31, 2012 9:19 AM in response to magnamentis

    Got some cryptic advice from 2nd line support that the issue may be to do with the core crypto kext file. As I had a backup they asked me to try deleting it - bricked the mac LOL

     

    Anyway, getting fed up so now reinstalling Snow Leop before re-upgrading to ML. Was not as straight forward as you would think, I had plug in a wired keyboard as the mac kept ignoring my key presses to boot from CD (weird eh?). Pulled ALL the disk partitions off including the recovery one by repartitioning the drive with a single partition.

     

    My gut says this will fix the issue but will report back later. Bit of a blunt instrument but I think my HD partitions got screwed somehow when the Mac recently went away to be fixed. When it came back, it kept wanting to boot into bootcamp without asking and refused to do much else.

     

    Wish me luck!

     

    D

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Jul 31, 2012 1:18 PM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 31, 2012 1:18 PM in response to dmerr1man

    So. Wiping the drive, ripping out the partitions and starting again appears to have done the trick.

     

    Brutal but effective and time consuming. Hope this helps someone.

     

    D

  • by magnamentis,

    magnamentis magnamentis Jul 31, 2012 4:02 PM in response to dmerr1man
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    Jul 31, 2012 4:02 PM in response to dmerr1man

    hi D :-)

     

    thanks for the posting, since you are in contact with apple and should they come up with information i would be interested to know what they have to say if anything :-)

     

    however i will follow suit and wipe the drive re-install and recover form time machine over night :-)

     

    thanks a lot

     

    ingo

  • by effzehn,

    effzehn effzehn Aug 7, 2012 2:14 PM in response to dmerr1man
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    Aug 7, 2012 2:14 PM in response to dmerr1man

    Did Apple Support reply yet?

  • by ben48,

    ben48 ben48 Aug 24, 2012 6:05 PM in response to effzehn
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    Aug 24, 2012 6:05 PM in response to effzehn

    I had the same problem today. I called Apple and they told me my two options were to wipe the machine or to send the issue to the engineers and wait to hear back. I decided to wipe the machine.

     

    Good news though, I made a lucky mistake. I've never wiped a Mac before, so I assumed re-installing the OS would delete existing data. (As it does when reinstalling Windows.) After peforming the re-install, I found that all my data and settings were intact and I didn't have to restore from backup. Most importantly, I was able to activate FileVault without getting this error.

     

    The reinstall took a couple hours, but restoring from backup and re-installing all my software would've taken a lot longer. You can reinstall OSX by holding down Command + R while the Mac is booting. Make sure you're backed up first, of course. It didn't delete my data but I wouldn't take the risk without a backup.

  • by dmerr1man,

    dmerr1man dmerr1man Aug 24, 2012 11:24 PM in response to ben48
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    Aug 24, 2012 11:24 PM in response to ben48

    Glad that worked for you Ben, the re-install wouldn't work for me. On reflection, I suspect the partitions got screwed up somehow which included the recovery partition. When I checked the FileVault logs after trying to enable it, there was an entry saying something about insufficient free space on the recovery partition.

     

    Cheers D

  • by effzehn,

    effzehn effzehn Aug 25, 2012 2:31 PM in response to ben48
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    Aug 25, 2012 2:31 PM in response to ben48

    Re-Install didnt work for me either.

    I guess it's worth a try since it "only" takes about 1-2 hours.

  • by net_jedi,

    net_jedi net_jedi Oct 2, 2012 5:10 AM in response to dmerr1man
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 2, 2012 5:10 AM in response to dmerr1man

    Will Apple be releasing a fix/update for those of us who want to have encryption?

     

    I have a Retina MBP factory installed with ML, same error when trying to enable File Vault.

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