8 comments

• 

  Venu

  2 years ago

  Greetings,
  
  We have a sparse image which after leaving mounted and experiencing a crash gives the error that it is a corrupted image and can't be mounted.
  
  Is there any hope to recover this image?
  
  Does anyone have any experience recovering in similar circumstances. Unfortunately we don't have a backup so this is problematic.
  
  We read here: /filevault_corruption/
  that you were able to copy the files from your sparse image to another. How do you do this? Our image is password protected (this is the whole point of doing it this way). So anyway we can copy the files from this corrupted image is ok.
  
  Any suggestions how to do this? That is, save the files?
  
  Thanks
  Venu
  vee308hotmail.com
  reply
• 

  schwa

  2 years ago

  Well in my case the disk underlying the sparse image was corrupt. Copying the sparse image to anothe drive helped me deal with that. IIRC (this was a while ago) the sparse image could be mounted but some data was missing.
  reply
• 

  Tom

  2 years ago

  I ran into similar issues, and wrote up a howto on fixing it. Let me know if this works for you:
  
  http://ekettoz.blogspot.com/2007/02/filevault-h...
  reply
• 

  schwa

  2 years ago

  Hi Tom,
  
  I just dont risk my data by using FileVault any more... But thanks for the link - hopefully it'll prove useful to others.
  reply
• 

  matthew

  8 months ago

  i have a similar problem. I enabled firevault on my main account and now when i log in, i get the spinning beach ball of death. i also seem to have a 210 gig home folder AND a 140 gig hard drive (total capacity.) Whenever I select it, it freezes up my computer. When i log in with another account, i look in my home folder and it is empty. Any suggestions?
  
  P.S.: it is a network account
  reply
• 

  Visitor

  8 months ago

  My favorite remote backup tool for Mac or Windows is JundleDisk.com - highly secure, highly automatic, and very affordable. The service backs an encrypted copy of your data on Amazon S3 servers for about $0.15 per GB. I have FileVault enabled on my local machine and regularily perform a local backup of my data. But a remote backup is also essential.... Mozy.com is also a similar service but I have heard some mixed reviews. Carbonite.com is coming out with a Mac client soon as well....
  reply
• 

  Bruce Campbell

  5 months ago

  Oh boy, FileVault (I now call it VileFault) has become corrupt on my Leopard MBP, I found I couldn't log in to my normal working account, and I took the following steps to fix it:
  
  <ol>
  <li>I logged into the admin account I have had set up on my machine since the beginning so I could do some diagnostics</li>
  <li>Immediately ran DiskWarrior, which reported that all the files could be recovered, but that it couldn't write the repaired directory, as it detected a media fault (I guess this means the damaged sparseimage acts the same as a damaged HD), so I should immediately copy the files to another location.</li>
  <li>I quickly got out my portable backup FireWire drive, plugged it in and copied the files to the backup disk</li>
  <li>Tried several times to copy the sparseimage file to another backup disk, so that I could go back if this whole process doesn't work</li>
  <li>When Finder copy didn't work, I tried using SuperDuper! to copy the sparseimage, but that failed as well.</li>
  <li>In frustration, I trashed the sparseimage, emptied the trash, then copied the recovered file structure from the DiskWarrior run into the Users folder.</li>
  <li>Attempted to log on to my normal account, and got the same message, "You are unable to log in to the FileVault user account "bmc" at this time" with the second line "Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred."</li>
  </ol>
  Is that it? Is there any way to get the OS to "forget" about the FileVault status, and just deal with the recovered directory structure as if FileVault had never been turned on?
  
  A couple of other pieces of information:
  <ul>
  <li>Running Leopard 10.5.6 now, but upgraded from Tiger.</li>
  <li>FileVault was implemented in Tiger (the old version of FV), and I didn't do the right thing when I upgraded.</li>
  <ol>
  <li>I should have done a full backup.</li>
  <li>I should have turned FV off before the drive got too full to do it.</li>
  <li>I should have done a clean install and migrate, rather than upgrading over Tiger.</li>
  </ol>
  </ul>
  
  Any assistance greatfully appreciated! This is both painful, and time consuming!
  reply
• 

  schwa

  5 months ago

  Hey Bruce,
  
  I haven't used FileVault in years - since this blog post actually. Wish I could help but really - might be time to create a new user account and swap your files manually? I don't know.
  
  Sorry.
  reply