filevault failed: boot file not written

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

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

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

Did Apple Support reply yet?

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.

Re-Install didnt work for me either.

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

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.