So yesterday evening I decided to encrypt my the hard drive on my personal computer, a 13 inch retina macbook pro, using filevault. At first it was all hunkydory– encrypted, wrote down the recovery key someplace secure, and continued working away at my deploy.sh script for my development environment.
I’d occasionally had to restart (installed Xcode, for one), and each time I was
presented with a snappy login in screen which asked me to decrypt the drive by
entering my password. Then, while I was in the middle of trying to figure out
a why installing Command-T would
pollute the current working directory with a bunch of .o and .h files in
addition to a Makefile, vim suddenly froze, and I was presented with the dread
“Your computer restarted because of a problem” message. I anxiously pressed the
any key to continue, which seemed like it was going okay until the mac just
booted to the no symbol and gear that
spun forever.
Uh oh!
On goes the software person hat. Luckily I’ve got my work computer home for the weekend, so I’ve been able to poke around on the barren waste of frustration that is the mac help forums. So far it’s been fun.
I booted into recovery mode (hold ctrl-R during reboot). Hooray! there’s a
diskutility, with my encrypted disk like there. Okay, good, click it. Press
unlock. Enter your password. The machine thinks for a good long while and then
shakes its’ head. Wat. And then, if I veryify and repair the disk (again via
diskutility), the volume is removed from the
sidebar on the left. Weeeeee!
Luckily there’s a terminal available in recovery mode, complete with diskutil
and dd. I reboot to get the machine back into the state it was in before I
started fucking with it, open the terminal and start poking around. After a bit
of snooping, I found a guide to unlocking a FileValut 2-encrypted boot drive
from the command
line.
Perfect! that sounds pretty much like my situation.
The instruction, essentially, is to first `diskutil cs unlockVolume