After Disk Utility couldn't repair my hard drive, and I was told to erase and reformat, I attempted to reinstall Mountain Lion but I keep getting this message saying "This disk is locked".
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
macbook, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
From: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5174378
Here’s how the unlock procedure works for Disk Utility:
1. Boot your Mac and hold down ⌘-R (Command –R) to boot from the Recovery HD partition.
2. Open Disk Utility.
3. Select your locked hard drive.
4. Under the File menu, select Unlock “Drive Name”
5. When prompted for a password, enter the password of the authorized account on the drive.
6. Once you unlock the disk, hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click on the File menu.
7. Under the File menu, select Turn Off Encryption… with the Option key held down, it is no longer grayed-out.
8. When prompted for a password, enter the password of the authorized account on the drive.
9. Disk Utility should display a progress window labeled Starting conversion to JHFS+
10. Your drive should now be unlocked.
Shut the computer down and then Restart.
Start up into Recovery HD and double click the Macintosh HD.
If it asks for, authenticate it.
Thanks, where do i do that though? When I restart it brings me to the OS X Utilities page.
If you live near an Apple Store, make a Genius Bar appointment to have the computer tested. Supposedly there is no charge for testing.
Genius Bar Reservation US
I almost gave up on my hard drive and almost wiped it clean.
Background: I upgraded the archaic spin drive to a 1tb SSD in 2013 iMac months ago. Something possessed me last night to hit upgrade to High Sierra.
The download went fine but when I said install the computer got stuck in the loop, of can't install the update because "your computer file system verify or repair failed" and no matter what I did I could not get out of this loop. I tried to boot form recover, boot form USB with sierra installer, tried to repair the hard drive which gave me errors like File system check exit code is 8, I tried single user mode, I tried network recovery..... like I said I tried everything. My plan was to dig up the old spinning hard drive to restore an image form it, albeit it few months old but better than nothing. Of course I do not have a backup because I said to myself this is an SSD on a mac what could go wrong, well I learned that lesson. Bottom line what needed to happen was enable journaling of the hard drive, something that was greyed out and was impossible to do. Installing a fresh OS was also not working because the computer would say the drive is locked. Enough of the problem here is the solution.
I bought a thunderbolt cable to connect the iMac to my trusted MacBook Pro. I then installed Disk Warrior software on a MacBook pro. Then I booted the iMac while holding down the t key, which allowed the MacBook to see the iMac as an external drive. Disk Warrior scanned the iMac's hard drive, rebuilt its directory and enabled journaling. I then unmounted the iMac from the MacBook and rebooted the iMac normally, and viola, high Sierra installation proceeded and 40 minutes later I am back to normal. I am considering this post and pay back for all the help I got from searching the net for hours on this issues.
The drive is failing, or has failed. If you don't already have a current backup, you need to back it up immediately. Do not try repair it or reinstall OS X.
Thanks for the help, I've already backed it up. But if I can't repair it or reinstall, what are my options?
That is what my iMac is doing!!
this happened to me , i bought a new drive and cloned the affected drive using "carbon copy cloner".. then did the reinstall on the newly cloned drive , this worked for me..
Can't reinstall OS X - "This disk is locked"
