Encrypted External Drive Issue

I have a WD 1TB external hard drive I formatted / encrypted using the Disk Utility function when I was running Lion. I have since upgraded to Mountain Lion and whilst I can still view and read the files from my Mac, I cannot seem to delete the files, or at least they show as deleted, but no additional space is made available on the drive. The drive does not seem to be completely compatible with Mountain Lion. Has anyone encountered a similar issue and have a solution that does not involve me reformatting my external hard drive? Thank you in advance for any responses.

Hi, I tried your advice and it tells me the external drive is ok, and the ERASE section is grey, probably because I encrypted the disk!?!
Still the same issue: every time I enter my password to access the external hard drive, it restarts the macbook and I get a screen that says: the computer restarted because of a problem... so frustrating!
Any other ideas?

Similar Messages

HOW TO FIX MOUNT ISSUE ON OSX 10.8.3 AND ENCRYPTED EXTERNAL DRIVES

OSX version 10.8.3 doesn't mount my encrypted external drive (MAC OSX extended journalled encrypted). When I enter my password the window greys out and stays there forever without mounting the drive. I have two seperate drives on this HDD ( one Fat and the other one journaled encrypted) the Fat one mounts without any roblem. The only option in the first aid tab is verify disk and everything else is greyed out. Resault of verify is "Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk." but I can't run repair since it is greyout.

If the volume won't mount, you can't repair it.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:
diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
Post any lines of output that appear below what you entered — the text, please, not a screenshot.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

Encrypt External Drive with TrueCrypt / PGP Signature

I want to use TrueCrypt to encrypt an external drive. I understand the new version of FileVault can do this but I prefer not to upgrade to Lion. I'd rather wait till Mountain Lion comes out later this year.
For those who have used both...Just wondering how TrueCrypt compares to FileVault in regards to encrypting an external drive.
Also, I am trying to install or execute the PGP Signature to ensure that the TrueCrypt software that I am downloading from the TrueCrypt's Web site is authentic and has not been hacked.
How do I run or install it? I double-click on the PGP Signature file, a window pops up and says it cannot find an application to open it. I even tried removing the ".sig" from the end of the file name and it say it cannot open the disk image.
There are instructions on the TrueCrypt web site for Windows users but none for the Mac users that I can see.

If you want better, more reliable security on a external drive, you should get a self encrypting external drive, these have a hardware based encryption, either a physical key and/or keypad to enter a password and do all the encryption/decryption on the drive itself.
No need for software means you can take your data to any secure machine and the computer thinks it just another drive. Software can become unrelaible or glitchy, subjected to updates/tampering. Hardwired requires physical possession of the device.
Also there are smalller portable USB thumb drives like Iron Key that also self-encrypt and have the advantage of being quickly discarded upon a threat.

Mavericks and unmounting external drive issues upon sleep

Greetings fellow Mavericks users,
I'm hoping someone here can provide some insight as to how to correct the issue I'm experiencing.
Little background:
I was using 10.6.8 for years on a 2008 Mac Pro. I saw no reason to update the OS until I recently acquired a USB 3.0 PCI card and an external drive. In order to use my new hardware, I had no choice but to upgrade to a new version of OSX. Rather than spend money, I took advantage of the free 10.9.2 upgrade available for my machine. The upgrade went surprisingly well with no major hiccups or problems encountered. Yes, a few apps and programs I had running prior to the upgrade were no longer compatible but in the grand scheme of things, my Mac Pro was still alive and kicking along with my most important programs and data. In fact, the upgrade to 10.9.2 fixed a sleep issue I had with 10.6.8 which required the use of an app called PleaseSleep. I don't need that app anymore as the machine goes to sleep and wakes up fine.
Now, on to my dilemma. Prior to the upgrade, I was using an external USB 2.0 drive to house media that I'd share between multiple network devices around the house via SMB (AFP stinks in this regard, hence my refusal to use it); i.e. BoxeeBox. I had run out of space on the USB2 drive hence the need to move everything to my new external USB3 drive that's connected to an internal USB3 PCI controller. The first problem I ran into was that Mavericks now uses Apple's own iteration of Samba (SMB2). After a bit of head scratching and research, I used an application called SMBUp as a replacement to Apple's SMB implementation. That's one problem solved. The next thing that I kept running into was that whenever the machine would sleep then wake up again, I'd get an annoying "Disk was not properly ejected" error message. After more head scratching and research, I've discovered that this appears to be a bug in OSX and how the OS interfaces with 3rd party USB controllers. Fine. I purchased a small app called Jettison which for all intents and purposes unmounts any external drives automatically before allowing the system to sleep. This is where my long-winded (apologies) description above starts to come into play. Now that I have the SMB issue figured out and am using Jettison to eject this USB3 drive when the machine sleeps, I've discovered that I'll still get the "Disk did not properly eject" error message despite Jettison IF there are users connected to the USB3 media drive. Is there a work around this where I can either get Jettison or Mavericks to kill the network connection to the share drive before it's unmounted prior to the machine sleeping?
TL:DR?
Using Jettison with Mavericks, I'm still getting "Disk did not eject properly" when waking the machine from sleep mode. Any way to fix this?
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions provided.

I had the same problem with Time Machine and solved it by enabling "Enable Power Nap" in Energy Saver:
System Preferences...
Energy Saver
Restore Defaults
Check "Enable Power Nap: While sleeping, your Mac can back up using Time Machine and periodically check for new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates."
2013 21.5 iMac
OSX Mavericks
Seagate 1 TB slim USB 3.0 (power is drawn from USB port), formatted to Mac Journaling File System

External drive issue

Hello everybody,
I have an external, PC formatted (NTFS) 1 GB drive that I was using without issues until yesterday.
I did a "Verify Disk" to the external drive with Disk Utility, and it recognised some errors in the drive, suggesting me to do a Repair Disk, which I did...
Sadly, it threw an error in the repairing, and now the disk is not mounted anymore (I can still see it in Disk Utility). I cannot do anything else, since Disk Utility has all the options in gray, so I'm unable to do any kind of repair or diagnose.
I also tried to use the disk on a PC that a friend brought, but it says that the disk is not formatted, and is asking me to do so... obviously I don't have plans to do that.
Does anybody know how to proceed from here? I really need to recover the information on the drive.
I have a 2012 Macbook Pro Retina, and I'm using NTFS for Mac OSX, in case this info is useful.
Thank you!
Martin

Once I reformatted the drive and put the old data back on, it worked fine. Still doesn't make sense.

Plausible deniability on an encrypted external drive?

Hello,
I would like to use an external drive as a backup to store my personal data. As I don't care about Windows compatibility, LUKS seems good for that.
But my problem is to encrypt my critical data (like bank details), where a nested hidden volume seems a good option. Arch still has the "good" version of TrueCrypt, but its strange end of life announcement make me wonder if it's still good to use.
LUKS' author doesn't plan to add this yet, listing a number of reasons but a comment (#18) seems to tell it's feasable.
So what are my options if I want to do that?
Thanks.

In regards to plausible deniability, it's possible to go even further if you're willing to roll up your sleeves...
You can do something like creating a "normal" partition containing stuff you don't care too much about, partially spanning the disk. Then, in the unallocated space beyond that partition, pick a region of sectors to use as the encrypted volume, and set up a loop device to access them.
losetup -o [offset in bytes] --sizelimit [size in bytes] /dev/loop0 /dev/sdX
Then, set up dm-crypt in *plain* mode on that loop device (plain mode means no header, so the encrypted data is theoretically indistinguishable from random garbage):
cryptsetup --cipher=${chosen_cipher} open --type=plain /dev/loop0 ${some_name}
which will make the decrypted device show up at /dev/mapper/some_name. This command prompts for a passphrase to be entered. note this command has do be re-done the same each time you need to mount the decrypted storage. You can also use a keyfile, by adding
--key-file=somefile --key-size=${size_of_key_in_bits}
to the cryptsetup command before "open". The mapper device can then be closed with
crypsetup close ${some_name}
and the raw loop device removed with
losetup -d /dev/loop0
If you do it this way, both the opening commands must be done manually when you want to access the encrypted storage. Additionally you'll need to remember the offset and size of the region on the external drive that is your encrypted data. However, if you overwrite the disk with random data before starting, there's no way to tell the encrypted data is there just by looking at the disk - hidden amongst the random data. The idea of the normal partition before it is to act like a decoy, so you could claim the "unallocated" space is just where you want to add a new partition later.

Transferring files from iMac to External Drive issues. Please help

I have a 500gb Western Digital external hard-drive. I began using it on a PC, but got a Mac a couple of months ago. There are a couple of problems that I am encountering. First of all, the folders that I had on my external drive (music, movies etc.) are all locked, and no matter what I try on the Mac, I cannot unlock them.
That really did not cause too much of an issue, because I would just drag them onto the drive, and put them in the proper folders when I connected it to a Windows machine.
However, recently when I try to transfer an album from the Mac to the external, I get an error message that says:
The finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "Song/Album.mp3" could not be read or written. (error code -36)
Basically my two questions are how do I unlock the folders on my external drive, and what is causing this error to start all of a sudden?
Any help would be appreciated

Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Select your external drive on the left then under the Erase tab select MS-DOS(FAT) as your volume format. Keep in mind that re-formatting your drive will erase all of the data so make sure you have it all backed up on your computer before you re-format.
http://ftp.georgetek.com/George/DiskUtilMS-DOS.png
Are you replacing your PC with the iMac or are you still going to use both computers?
George

Another external drive issue with Frontrow

I've already looked at these treads,
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1511877&tstart=2
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8593111&#8593111
But they aren't really everything. I have an external drive that I have my Movies, TV Shows, and Music on. I changed the location in iTunes, and everything imported fine. My AppleTV sees all of them just fine. However Frontrow won't. I can put an alias in the Movies folder as described, but then I don't see anything in the TV Shows menu option in FR. Sure they are listed under the movies, if I put a shortcut in there for them. I want Frontrow to work just as it did when all my media was on the local drive, how do I do that?

Hello Brett!,
A rule i usually live by when purchasing externals, is to firstly check the file format (many are factory formatted in NTFS or FAT32) and if that is the case then change them to HFS+ using disk utility. That is of course if you intend to only use it with your mac, for example i use an external formatted in FAT32 and it works on Windows and Mac.
Secondly its a good code of practice to make sure the drive spins up, as that is the easiest way to check for a dodgy powersupply.
Thirdly and hopefully finally, if those tips don't work then try mounting it on another mac or pc and see if it is detected in any form, that'll tell you if there is a connection issue.
Regards,

Dual External Drive Issue

I have two WD Passport drives. One serves as my Time Machine back up drive and the other for my iPhote and iTunes library. My issue is that when I plug both of them into the USB ports, my Macbook Pro only recognizes one of them. Why? I can only think that the Macbook cannot power both from the USBs. This also means that Time Machine is not backing up my other external drive as they both cannot operate at the same time. So, would then need to move my iPhoto and iTunes back to the hard drive which is more than half full already. Any help????

Do both HDDs operate correctly when attached individually and do so on all USB ports? If so, the MBP should be able to power both.
Try SMC and Pram resets:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
If they do not solve the issue, a work around is a powered hub but an appointment at an Apple genius bar should be made so that the problem is identified and corrected.
Ciao.

USB External Drive issue with 10.5.7

Just as infos : i have experienced a weird issue regarding my external USB Lacie Drive. It has been recognise by 10.5.7 as a SAMSUNG drive. I use this external drive with time Machine for backup. Everything dispite that seems to work, but can't take the risk as i didn't noticed improvement in my system of Logic with the new OS, i have decide to downgrade.

thank you everybody for your replies, but as i said i went back to 10.5.6 and everything works perfectly here. Yes under USB (system profiler) the drive is well recognise by the system, it's only under 10.5.7 that that drive was listing as a SAMSUNG. Anyway, i will give another try to 10.5.7 in few weeks, as i am in a middle of the projet (CD for a local artist), it might be wise i stay under 10.5.6 as it works well on my system.
PS (as i said earlier the drive was working well under 10.5.7 but just listed as a Samsung drive). I am not be the only one ?

IPhoto '09 Rebuild Library on External Drive Issue

I am trying to rebuild my library with the option + iphoto launch, but i keep getting the window asking me "What photo library do you want iPhoto to use?"
I select the default library on my external drive, which is the only library I have, while still holding down the "option" key, select "choose" and then the same window pops open again "What photo library do you want iPhoto to use?"
Keeps going in circles and never gives me the options to rebuild.
I also tried to releasing the option key when this window opens and the result is just that it launches iPhoto.
What is the issue here? Why does it keep asking what library I want to use? How do I default this window automatically so it knows already the library location and then I can proceed with the rebuild?
When the library was on the local drive months ago, it never did this.
Thanks in advance.

It keeps asking you which Library you want to use because you keep using the keystroke that gives you that option.
If you want to rebuild the Library you need to hold the *command and option (or alt) keys* when launching to get that menu.
Regards
TD

ITunes library on external drive issue....

I have my entire iTunes library on an external hard drive. I recently moved and had to restore my computer because of some issues. The computer is working now but iTunes does not recognize my library on the external drive. It shows everything I have purchased in the cloud but anything that I have manually put in my library doe snot show up in my library. When I look in the external drive all my media is there, I just can't get to it through iTunes. The path that can be changed in the advanced settings is not right and I am not sure how to correct the path. Thanks
I have a late 2008 iMac - 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - I just upgraded RAM to 6GB - right after I upgraded the RAM iMac booted into disk utilities - had to end up reinstalling OS and basically restore my files from Time Machine. Since I had to redownload iTunes the path under Advanced settings is not correct - it is not linked to my external. How do I fix this - I have had my library set up like this for years I just can't remember how to do it.
Thanks

dekker1 in your screenshot the folder that is usually 'one level above' that has the 'iTunes Library.itl' and the 'iTunes Music Library.xml'. Do you have copies of those files?
Those two are the files that maintain iTunes Data (playlists, ratings, song info …). Purchased files come from iCloud so that is why they always show up for download. According to Apple the library files should be placed in your home folder…
iTunes: What are the iTunes library files?
Can you restore those files back to /Users/[username]/Music/iTunes/ ?
If you don't have these files the only choice I can see is to import all the files & manually recreate all the playlists (this loses metadata, play count etc).
Normally you also have the following at the same location in your /Users/[username]/Music/iTunes/ folder.
Album Artwork/
iTunes Library Extras.itdb
iTunes Library Genius.itdb
Previous iTunes Libraries/
If you also have copies of these, restore them too.
The media folder can live anywhere, but you set the preference in iTunes to that location. It looks like your library may be in a mess already, the duplicate "Automatically add to iTunes" folders are a sign that you have chosen the wrong folder for iTunes media at some point.
Apple have a guide for moving the media, you need to ensure the media library is in the same path as on the old system, otherwise links to files will break.
iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
Once the media is working you can 'consolidate it' but it must be in a good state before this.
I hope that makes sense, does this clarify anything? I use those Apple pages as a guide for moving & handling iTunes media.

Restore backup from encrypted external drive?

I seen many articles about restoring Time Machine backups encypted/non-encrypted from external hard drives. Is there any problem restoring an unencrypted Time Machine backup from an OS X encrypted external hard drive?

The procedure is the same, whether the backup is encrypted or not.

USB external drive issues

Just connected my external drive to my Airport Extreme and when I click on Disk in Airport Utility, it sees the disk. However, whenever I try to do a backup, it fails. I get an exclamation point in the Time Machine symbol (top right corner of the menu bar). When I click on the symbol and open up the preferences, it shows the name of the drive (so clearly it is seeing it) but next to Available, all I see is "--". Can anyone help?

Two things strike me:
Have you been able to get any USB drive to work in the port, even a "thumb drive"? That might help you differentiate between a problem with the drive and problem with the router's port. I don't have a MyBook drive, but I'd be shocked beyond belief if this was a compatibility issue. Yes, I know that truth is often stranger than fiction, but to get that status, it first has to be proven true and then strange. At this point every USB device I've plugged into that port on the back of the router has been recognized, that includes a WD Passport drive.
Have you tried something simple like just using a different USB cable? A friend of mine was having difficulties getting an external drive to be recognized by both computers in her home. It had me really scratching my head. Long story short, when I swapped out her cable with the cable from that Passport drive everything worked just fine on both machines. She got a new cable for herself and all is well. The KISS principle really does work sometimes.

FileVault vs TrueCrypt to Encrypting External Drive

I was wondering how FileVault and TrueCrypt compare in regards to encrypting an external hard drive. Is one more secure than the other?
TrueCrypt claims there is no "backdoor," I am not sure if the same can be said for FileVault. And I guess there is some kind of key associated with FileVault. Is that a separate file or is it stored in the Keychain?
Other users have recommend getting a hardware based encryption that is built into some external drives but I don't have the funds to spend on such a purchase.
Also, I am not ready to upgrade to Lion and perhaps not even Mountain Lion. I am hoping that Mountain Lion will work better with Adobe CS5.5 as compared to Lion.

@Kaldek,
Are you related to "Marksman338"?
heheheh
Really, though, speaking of "very little fact" I would greately appreciate it if you could cite your sources. I'm always looking for fresh info, and there is so much out there its hard to read it all.
So lets work as team. Please provde some references and a little more detail so I can understand the "best practice" you have developed.
And, just for the record, since you did make a specific inaccurate statement:
I said:
Encryption is for people that are more worried about their data becoming public than they are worried about having the data.
In the very first post. Which would cover those (very few) people needing to be concerned about data theft through hardware theft.
I appologize if that was too sublte for you. Being lazy, I do try and minimize my verbage.
Just in case your right please allow me to rephrase:
If your computer contains or manages sensitive data a person, group, or organisation - other than yourself - could profit from then you should EXIT this forum immediately and hire a Consultant to setup and secure your system.
If, on the other hand, you are in the 98th percentile of users on this system who only have personal information on their computer. Cherished memories in digital images while "priceless" to you are of little value to anybody else. You, please, I beg of you, do not encrypt your drive.
I had one recently. Encyrpted drive so the "hackers" can't get in. Drive died. They just never "got around" to making a single backup. Nothing can be recovered!
It hurts me too. Please don't do it. If you stil think you "need" encryption please post here so we can talk about it. Make sure its the right choice, and make sure you have a data recovery plan in place.
I can't decide if encyrpting USB or other portable media you might "leave in a Taxi" is worth it. Again, the data's value is low. Most people discovering it will just erase it so they can enjoy their "new" drive.

Encrypted External Drive Issue

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