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?

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

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.