Leopard Update: VERY IMPORTANT!
October 28, 2007OK, before you install leopard make sure that you TURN OFF FILEVAULT!!!!!!! VERY IMPORTANT. We learned the hard way. Thankfully though we were able to get back our important documents. Why should you turn off Filevault? Simple, all the accounts where filevault is turned on, you will not ever be able to get back into again. But we had a full system backup, and were able to restore pretty much everything except for the accounts which we did not have backed up. One of which was mine. So it’s a good thing I had all my important files on the pc. If you have already installed leopard and you had file vault turned on, hopefully you had a backup of the files, if you didn’t well then it’s too bad for you, ’cause you ain’t never gonna see them again! But if you have leopard installed with filevault on, in some of the accounts, reinstall tiger, you can do a clean erase if you want because even if you archive and install, you won’t be able to access the files anyway. So reinstall tiger, make sure you had a back-up of the files on an external drive, and then reinstall leopard and then restore your files back to your computer. Hopefully this helps somebody who has any problems.But just so everyone knows, no you can’t sue apple because they did have it written down, when you put the install disk in and then you click more information, they do tell you to turn off filevault before you install.
It got me. You know what, though? FileVault is Apple’s software; it should have performed a f**king check, and warned about the specific directories that were clearly at stake.
This is absolutely stupid.
Yep apple should have warned people a lot better than they did. I think they were in a rush to get leopard out before christmas and so they didn’t think about it.
It hit me too. If somebody asks me my personal opinion, the test manager responsible for the install procedure should think about getting himself another job. Did anybody ever say that apple is superior or something. I had a lot of trouble with M$-Doze, but at least I NEVER lost data. That’s something I only experienced on a MAC. I’m bl**dy p*ss*d
You won’t lose any data. The filevault sparseimage is still in your home directory. I was able to mount mine from single user mode (using hdiutil) and see the data. I was also able to repair it with fsck_hfs -r, but it seems like some other people have needed to use DiskWarrior to repair the filesystem. You should probably backup your sparseimage just in case the repair doesn’t go well.
Good thing I cloned my hd. Now Im restoring it and re-installing Leopard without FV on. I agree with Wolfgang the test manager should be fired.
Joe that will only work if you are an OS X expert. It doesn’t work well for Apple’s general target audience. Ease of use is Apples niche isn’t it?
Joe-Don’t you just love UNIX-based systems? Although unforgiving from the command line, with the GUI in place there is still some hope.
PD-Yes, I agree ease of use is an Apple feature. However, in order to do all the things the OS does (as a UNIX flavor), it is not really that much more difficult to fix than a Windoze problem. In fact, I think I would argue that because Windoze is so dumbed-down and restrictive, you can actually experience more difficulty in fixing a “doze” problem. Suggestion: Get books 1 and 2 in the Unix for Dummies collection. Also, if you have a sense of humor, then grab yourself the Underground Guide to Unix (you’ll recognize it by the 1950’s era couple dancing on the front cover).
First, I did a simple Leopard upgrade. Everything seemed fine… Logged in without a hitch, but Suitcase Fusion couldn’t hack it. Their tech support told me to do an archive and install and that’s when the FileVault issue got me. I’m not a happy girl right now. I just tried to repair the sparseimage from another user account but no dice. I’m trying a safe boot now…
you can use toast to activate the sparseimage. after that you can copy the whole home folder to a new account.
Joe, I appear to be among the many that knew nothing about the FileVault issue, however, I still have full access to all my folders the only issue I’m getting is when I run ‘time machine’ it isn’t backing up this folder. Sadly, when I try and turn off FileVault it starts to perform the decryption routine only to stop and report an error that it has failed. Anything you can suggest to get round this problem?
Today I successfully completed my Leopard installation but the only problem I had when I found in the instructions from the CD that you have to TURN OFF “File Vault” which I had kept it ON on my laptop MacBook Pro.
I had 120 GB and had only 16 GB left on my hard drive. I found that I require double to space to decrypt the files to TURN it OFF. So I removed 51 GB of data on my other disk and then I had lot of free space to decrypt my files.
As usually when ever I turn my computer off the file vault recovers the free space which was not happening. It tried more than 10 time to restart my computer but it failed to recover, even when I tried to recover free space using disk utility. Even I knew that I had almost 67 GB free space. Also when ever i tried to TURN IT OFF it informs me that I require 4041 GB of free space.
So I called several guys in India who knows about this but all forced me to make a new user and copy all files in the new user and delete the old user which was again too technical for me. As the curiosity of installing the new leopard was tempting and I did not want to wait longer to go the Mac store and let their engineers do for me.
So what I tried was to restarted my computer in safe mode and then tried to TURN OFF the FILE VAULT and it worked well. It took some time but it decrypted all files properly. I than restarted my computer in normal mode and found that I had 67 GB of free space in my hard drive.
Later I installed my new LEOPARD safely with doing much setting and making new users etc.
I hope this is an important issue for you to make a podcast on this matter to explain this and I am sure many of mac users might be facing this problem it would be helpful to them.
Secondly this solution worked with me but I am not sure whether it can work with any other computers but this can be one of the easy solutions for others.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about FileVault in general and its reliability (or lack thereof). I think this is in part due to Apple’s virtually absence of documentation for FileVault and the fact that it actually has significantly altered its architecture at least 3 times since its public release.
Of particular interest from a reliability standpoint is its change from v1 to v2 (became default in 10.4.7). Here Apple began storing the sparseimage “headers” information at the beginning of the file. Previously it was stored at the end of the file and was therefore easily corrupted if the computer crashed without the image being closed correctly. If the headers get corrupt, the image is toast in my experience. NOTE: this is not the same as the filesystem on the image becoming corrupt.
As a religious FileVault user I turned off FileVault protection and re-enabled it when I upgraded to 10.4.7 and after that I never suffered a corrupt FileVault again.
The architecture changed again significantly in 10.5 with the shift to sparsebundles. I’m currently going through the process of disabling and re-enabling filevault to move to this new architecture. I think this may facilitate the use of Time Machine with FileVault (but have yet to test this).
Its also worth noting that I upgraded to 10.5 with FileVault enabled and had no issues. Its possibly that the people having issues are still using v1 sparseimages or that the filesystems on their FileVaults are corrupt and Leopard is seeing that and refusing to mount them.
One time I received an error saying my FileVault had become corrupt and could not be mounted and I was able to repair the file system on it with a 3rd party disk utility successfully with no lasting consequences.
I tried to find some articles on this to cite for those interested in this – all I found at a glance was http://crypto.nsa.org/vilefault/23C3-VileFault.pdf but I know there are others out there I’ve read before.
Good luck! For the record, my advice would be to “upgrade” your FileVault to v2 before upgrading to Leopard by turning FileVault off and on, or simply turning it off for the upgrade and re-enabling it after.
– Matt
so… i’ve been badly bitten by this.
I saw nothing in the upgrade instructions about turning off filevault (which i have set to encrypt the whole home folder. did the entire upgrade with it on, and after first restart the computer
seemed to come up ok, but i did notice that the files that I’d left lying on the desktop weren’t there. I think they showed in my documents folder.
anyway i tried to restart at that point, and ever since i can’t boot up the computer at all. i get the message:
“your filevault-protected home folder did not open and needs to be repaired. Click ok to repair the folder and continue logging in. click cancel to log in as a different user”.
when i click “ok” i get “you are unable to log in to the user account at this time. logging in to the account failed because an error occurred.”
I don’t know how to log in as a different user – it’s a powerbook and i’ve only ever had one user.
any ideas about what i can do?
I would reinstall Tiger then log into your account and turn file vault off, back up all your files just in case, and create another admin account just in case. Then reinstall leopard and see if your account works.
I had the same problems trying to get AD accounts to login on the Mac.
Here is what I found works.
In Directory Utility / Services I unchecked ‘Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location’
I then check ‘create mobile account at logon’ and uncheck require confirmation.
You want to make sure a user has a home directory otherwise application like Firefox get confused and don’t know where to store personal settings.
Great post., bro