a brody
Q: I forgot a Keychain password for an external hard drive
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May 28, 2014 1:04 PMby Mac Nola,Sorry a brody, but the link you provided did not resolve my problem. I have easily changed my password, however when I plug in my external hard drive, Keychain comes up and asks for the password. When I put in my new password it is rejected. Can you or anyone help me to be able to access my external harddrive? Thank you.
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May 28, 2014 6:07 PMby markwmsn,Sounds like you (or somebody) encrypted the disk with FileVault2.
When you enabled FileVault2, you should have received a message similar to the following:
WARNING: You will need your login password or a recovery key to access your data. A recovery key is automatically generated as part of this setup. If you forget both your password and recovery key, the data will be lost.
(That's the wording when encrypting the boot volume in Security & Privacy preference. The wording when creating an encrypted non-boot disk with Erase in Disk Utility is slightly different, but also includes red-letter WARNING about data loss if you forget the password.)
If the disk is encrypted with FileVault, better hope you can remember the password. As the help says, "The disk encryption in Mac OS X uses the government-approved encryption standard, the Advanced Encryption Standard with 128-bit keys (AES-128)."
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May 29, 2014 11:56 AMby Mac Nola,Oh dear. It was over a year ago that I installed Verbatim and left myself a password clue which has proved useless to this old brain. I am not worried about any data currently on my external hard drive, I simply want to save my data now. I did a Spotlight search for FileVault 2 but don't see any file to access, possibly because it's not possible?
How do I determine if the disk is encrypted with FileVault?
Failing all of this, what is my recourse to using my Verbatim Store 'n' Go 500GB?
Thank you.
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May 29, 2014 2:20 PMby markwmsn,HelpfulIf you can live without the data and just want to use the disk again for something else, I understand that you can use the recovery disk to run fdisk under Terminal to reformat the drive as MBR (a Windows format), thus losing all track of the contents of the drive including the fact that it was encrypted, then run Disk Utility to erase it and format it back to Mac OS format.
Search the web for "break FileVault disk encryption to reinstall OSX" for details.
There are other, more esoteric ways to accomplish the same thing, but this one looks pretty straighforward if a little scary if you are not comfortable with using the command line.
