I cannot encrypt my Mac OS Extended External Hard Drive

Question

I cannot encrypt my Mac OS Extended External Hard Drive

I Have a MacBook Pro (Mid 2012) running High Sierra.

I am trying to password protect a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive.

I have used Disk Utility to Erase the drive and re-format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled),

but I can't for the life of me find the Encrypted format selection...

Disk Utility won't give me the ability to partition the disk... does that mean there is a Seagate encrypted partition on there already that I don't have access to?

Here's the drives info...

Anyone help?

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012), Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Sep 2, 2018 2:05 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

pyramidbuilder Author

Level 1

5 points

Sep 2, 2018 2:39 PM in response to Kappy

Looking at your screen grab has made me realise that your disk utility was different to mine even though your running the same OS.

I didn't have any of the little arrows in the sidebar.

Clicked on the View tab, and it came up with an option to "show all devices" instead of the default? "show all Volumes".

Now I have the ability to select the Encrypted versions too!

What a daft tab!

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Sep 2, 2018 2:19 PM in response to pyramidbuilder

I believe you want to use FileVault in the Security & Privacy preferences.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Sep 2, 2018 2:40 PM in response to pyramidbuilder

In Disk Utility:

This panel appears when you click on the Format Type in the main panel by selecting the volume in the sidebar list then clicking on the Erase button in Disk Utility's toolbar.

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Answer 4

Sep 2, 2018 2:26 PM in response to Kappy

FireVault is on.

It doesn't give me any options for my External Hard Drive... should it? Isn't FileVault for Internal Drives only?

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I cannot encrypt my Mac OS Extended External Hard Drive

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