Filevault disabling issues (when trying to add partition)

S

seangrimes590

Registered
Hey everybody,
First off I am running 10.7.4 on a late 2011 13'' MBP

I am having some issues with partitioning my HDD. I am trying to give myself a 60 GB partition in anticipation of adding an ssd in the near future. I want to get a fresh install on there and have the apps set up how I will want them after the ssd addition, just to save myself time later since I have the time now. The problem I am having is with disk utility. Initially I tried partitioning before disabling file vault 2, it wouldn't let me, not really surprised about that so I let the decryption commence overnight. I then went and booted into the recovery partition and tried partitioning the drive again. The add (+) partition option was still greyed out and it was still telling me that there was encrypted information on the drive. I am fairly computer literate but new to macs and osx and their file system (I have been using linux and windows for years). What do I need to do to get disk utility to see my HDD as decrypted? I am thinking that maybe I should try repairing permissions but I don't see the correlation between the two. Any help would be great, I would really rather not wipe the drive and reinstall (although I do have a time machine backup and a super duper image).

Thanks everyone!

PS.
I'm new to the forum, my name is Sean. I believe that I'll be able to answer more questions then I ask, I promise I'm not jumping in for some quick answers then running without returning the favors.



Some addition information after initially writing this:

Some additional information. I ran through the permission repair without issue. But, when trying to 'repair' disk, or 'verify' disk I get an error stating that it can't complete the task. The specific information in the history is: "Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map". I don't know what to do now. I'm out of buttons to push so to speak.

Thanks again for your help
 
So it seems that the decryption process wasn't completed correctly. I did the standard fix it, booting from recovery and repairing drive and partition and fixing the permissions. When running diskutil from terminal I found that the CoreStorage logical partition is still in existence, something that isn't supposed to be there when the decryption process completes correctly. Now I know the problem, I don't know how to fix it without just formatting the drive. I'd really rather not format the drive and reinstall lion, although I suppose if I have to do that, I can get away without doing a clean install of mountain lion in a month. If anybody knows how I can 'complete' the core storage removal process please help.

Thanks again.
 
Okay so I had the idea of turning file vault on, canceling the encryption and then telling it to decrypt, hoping it would complete the core storage removal process. But, I can't turn file vault on. The thing prefpane tells me to restart, I do, go back in and it tells me to restart again. Tried it a few times just for kicks even though I didn't expect any change and I was right, no change. So basically all that did for me was confirm that this is an issue relating to decrypting file vault 2. No more updates now, all I can hope for is somebody knows how to fix this issue without formatting the HDD. I could probably play around in terminal but its fairly likely that I'll end up screwing it up and having to format anyway.

Thanks again.
 
For those of you that may run across this problem in the future, I found out how to remove the logical volume that filevault 2 uses for the full disk encryption. When the decryption process runs without issue, the logical volume is removed automatically, thus no issues. But, 'using your computer' throughout the decryption process seems to be the cause of many problems that I have found across the internet. Specifically downloading while decrypting. Thinking about it now, it seems like common sense that I shouldn't have been downloading files to the HDD while also decrypting it, but you learn as you go.

How I fixed the problem: after trying many different things before formatting the HDD, I decided there wasn't going to be any luck. I tried formatting through disk utility after booting into the recovery partition, no luck in removing the logical volume there, even though the recovery 'shouldn't' have been running into issues. I booted off an external that had 10.6 installed on it, used diskutil through the terminal, first formatted the logical volume because diskutil was prevented from formatting the drive without the logical being removed. Than I formatted "Macintosh HD", followed by finally being allowed to format the entire drive. Long and frustrating process, the message people should keep in mind is that even though Apple says you can use your computer while decrypting, you should probably just allow it to run overnight instead.
 
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