The Fiasco With FileVault
Last week, like many people, I upgraded my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.5.1. Upon system reboot I was not able to log into my user account because the OS was complaining that FileVault wasn’t working properly.
Panic begins…
I had no backups. In fact the day of the fault I was pondering buying an external disk for the express purpose of Time Vault. Great timing..
I tried all of the things outlined on all the websites but nothing worked. I was on holiday so I didn’t have access to my Leopard or Tiger CDs. In the end I had to resort to DiskWarrior to recover the data.
The process went like this:
- Borrow an external USB disk.
- Backup FileVault sparse image.
- Attach the FileVault sparse image
- dd the filesystem from the sparse image to the spare USB disk
- Boot from the DiskWarrior 4 CD and attempt to repair the USB disk (it failed)
- Attempt to repair the filesystem image on the USB disk (it worked!)
- Reboot to Leopard and mount the fixed filesystem image and copy the contents to my mac
- Realise I made a mistake by copying to my user directory; make a lisa2 account
- Copy the data to lisa2, delete lisa account, recreate lisa account, copy data back
- Log in to lisa account, find all my data and reoice
The moral of the story is: Don’t be the first to upgrade.
