Q: FileVault stuck on "Encryption Paused"

You Sir, are fantastic, a big Thank You. It worked like a charm as soon as the UPS USB plug was removed and rebooted. It also may answer questions about oddities using Time Machine.

El Capitan still has a few bugs. Now, if I could only get my sounds back in Mail again!!

Regards

I've been fighting with my Macbook Pro for three days now after upgrading to El Capitan and electing to use FileVault. Your solution is what helped me. Thanks!

Thank you!

I was at the same point as you were, tried everything and nothing really worked. Until your post came along. This one worked. Finally!

Now upgrading my MBP to El Capitan

I ran into the same problem today.  I got a refurb 13.3 MBP Retina, restored it from a Time Machine backup of the prior laptop, ended up with a paused Filevault encryption that could not be un-paused or turned off.  The paused encryption prevented installation of El Capitan. 

Many thanks for posting the original message, and to all those who posted their solutions. 

I read through everything here and was about to create a USB boot drive, but the last thing I tried worked.

I opened Disk Utility, selected the hard drive and ran Disk Repair on it.  The disk repair ran and created many lines of reported activity.

One of those lines said, "The volume / was re-sized to unblock Paused encryption"

When I went back to FileVault in system preferences, the encryption had resumed (Now shows "Optimizing") and gave me a live progress bar with the calculated time remaining.

Fixed:

1. create a bootable OS X El Capitan USB Drive, (Here's how: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372) Note: you'll need a mac with El Capitan already installed to do this... or if you've got a friend with a working El Capitan system, have them do it.
2. Boot up you Mac from the Bootable USB Drive (plug in the drive, turn on your mac and hold down "option" as soon as you hear the startup chime) Select the "El Capitan" disk to start from.
3. When the installer loads, don't install El Capitan, just select "Disk Utility" from the "Utilities" menu, or select it in the options window that loads.
4. Once Disk Utility loads, select your startup disk in the sidebar and select "unlock" from the file menu. Enter your password when prompted.
5. Select Disk First Aid and run "Repair Disk" Wait for it to finish.  Select Shut down from the apple menu, remove the USB drive, and turn your mac back on.  You should now see Encryption resume and complete when looking in System Preferences and Security.
6. Pour yourself a drink, you've earned it.

Hope you can all make sense of my directions.

Anyone with this issue should try the PRAM reset. You won't lose any data it just fixes this issue up. To do this reset first turn your computer off (shut it down) then when turning it on press command, shift 'R', 'P' while pressing the ON button. After this you should see a black screen with white words on it. I just turned the computer off after all the white words have been said. Then turned it on again and the encryption was working.

PS sorry if this does not work for you it worked for me

Sorry i left some info out turn it on after turning it off the second time and the encryption should work

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately it didn't work for me.

The final lines in the 'details' box of first aid are:

File system check exit code is 0

Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required

Checking for overcommitted space in Logical Volume Group

Shrinking file system

Shrinking Logical Volume

Resizing Core Storage Logical Volume structures

A problem occurred; undoing Logical Volume resize changes.

Operation successful.

Since Apple are the ones who formatted the disk in the first place, it seems they manufactured this unit incorrectly before sending it out, because I've certainly not changed any disk partitions.

I really hate messages like 'A problem occurred' that give no details (especially in a 'details' box): it's like talking to a two year old who's just fed a sandwich to the DVD player.

This only confirms me in never buying Apple products: I only use this Mac because my work writes Mac applications and Apple prohibit virtualised MacOS.

A quick solution that worked like a charm is described here:

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/yosemites-paused-encryption-problem -fixed-in-10-10-3/

In short, just run a fsck on the boot drive and encryption should finished

sudo fsck_cs -y disk_identifier_goes_here

Worked for me on Yosemite 10.10.5.

This one worked for me.

Open in recovery mode (Command + R)

Open DiscUtils and Erase the Disk (erase the partitions you can).

Re-start - This prompts for Internet Recovery, and follow the onscreen instructions.

(Painful process I agree and if there was no backup, one is stuffed)

Well, I finally got rid of the same problem, after two long and slow years.

I tried everything you guys and all the other internet gurus suggested. All the tricks, all the command lines, rituals, whichcraft, prayers ... but no recipe was able to get my stuck FileVault back on encrypting. Always the status was the same: pending.

I couldn't do a Time Machine backup, the process was always stopped at the middle, due to an unknown corestoraged error. Shame on you FileVault!

Then, I gave up and solved the problem for good:

a)I copied all the important files to a external HD

b) erased Macintosh HD

c) installed a new copy of OS X (without FileVault of course)

d) upgraded to El Captain

e) copied back my files from external HD

Now I am very happy: my MB looks and sounds new.

The battery is alive and well. And it's faster than never!

No more fdesetup status in my life!!!

FREE YOURSELF FROM FILEVAULT TOO!