Apple - FileVault Stuck on Pause

I asked after this while attending WWDC 2015 and was told that the "Encryption Paused" issue was addressed in 10.10.3.

The root cause was a problem with resizing the CoreStorage volume during the encryption process. When the CoreStorage volume was unable to grow, the encryption was paused and could not resume until the resize issue was addressed.

To fix this issue:

1. Update your Mac to 10.10.3 or boot from an alternate drive which is running 10.10.3.
2. Unlock the encrypted drive if necessary
3. Open Terminal

4. Run the following command to get your Mac's disk identifier:

   diskutil list
   

5. Once you have the disk identifier information, run the following command with root privileges:

   fsck_cs -y disk_identifier_goes_here
   

6. fsck_cs should repair the CoreStorage volume and address the resizing issue. As part of the output, it should show that encryption is resuming.

I spoke with Apple and my case was escalated. I sent in logs for the engineers to evaluate, and they determined that the FileVault encryption had failed. As other users have reported, the only suggestion was to make a Time Machine backup, wipe the drive, reinstall Yosemite, and restore from the Time Machine backup.

A few important notes (from forum posts I've read):

• When you wipe the drive, select Journaled. It defaults to Journaled, Encrypted, but leaving encryption enabled will not solve the problem.
• A Time Machine backup is not required to wipe the drive and reinstall OS X Yosemite, but it's the easiest way to retain your data.
• You must un-check FileVault during the initial OS X setup, otherwise this problem might reoccur. Of course, it might work the second time around... but why take the risk? Wait for Apple to fix this bug before you enable FileVault again.
• If you restore from the Time Machine backup during the OS X installation, you won't be prompted to enable FileVault and it should be off by default.

If this solution is not satisfactory, you might find some guidance from this guide on failed FileVault encryption. I considered a similar approach (I found that guide by searching Google for "killing corestoraged"), but ultimately decided to go with the tried and true (and tedious) approach of a full reinstall.

For posterity, a partial excerpt of the aforementioned guide:

So scanning for the according process turned out that corestoraged was causing the high load. Giving it a 50/50 chance to fix it or to destroy my system completely I had an idea how to fix it. So first I tried to simply kill the process. That worked but after a few seconds the process reappeared – so it must have been started from another daemon. It turned out that actually the launchd is kicking off this process. So either to go through the whole tutorial [2] I decided to do a quick fix/trial. So my idea was to move the daemon binary and than to kill the process. So I did the following:

firebird:~ jvr$ mv /usr/libexec/corestoraged /usr/libexec/corestoraged.old
firebird:~ jvr$ killall corestoraged

And suprisingly the load dropped, while my operating system was still working. Please note that this is highly risky and I would not recommend to do it unless you don’t see any other options.

It should be also noted that there is definitely a better solution in place related to the launchd configuration. Neither the less Apple should get their FileVault running stable, especially since it has to be considered as a core service.

[2014/09/09] Update: Already giving up my hope to fix the issue permanently, I started to backup my MacBook and prepare for a re-installation. Even if the above workaround resolved the CPU usage & power consumption issue, I did not feel comfortable moving around core processes, where I was not 100% sure what they are doing. So I backed up everything and started cleaning my machine. Having everything done so far I decided to start the Mac in Recovery mode and try one more time the disk repair functionality (especially the fix permissions). After doing this, I thought I give it one more last try. Booted up, moved the corestoraged back and checked in the FileVault progress screen within the Security Settings. And suddenly I saw that the encryption process was working again. This time I did not touch the machine anymore until the encryption was finished.

And what I have learned from this lesson – do backups. And the second lesson I’ve learned: never go the easy way and start reinstalling your operating system.

I want to share the solution that fixed the problem for me.

First of all, my El Capitan install failed, resulting in that after boot the login screen was shown, but after a login, there was a kernel panic and the Mac restarted.

So I tried to reinstall via the Recovery Mode, but at the point of selected the HD, I got this message: FileVault conversion in progress. Use the "Security and Privacy" preference pane to check conversion status.

These steps solved my problem:

• Go the Recovery mode (hold cmd + R during boot)
• Open a terminal, and type: diskuitl cs list result: Conversion Progress: Paused
• I opened a second terminal window
• Searched for the binary 'corestoraged': file / -name 'corestorage*'
• Found it in the recovery folder: /usr/libexec/corestoraged
• Started corestoraged in the found folder: ./corestoraged
• Now check the HD via the first terminal, the Conversion progress now showed a percentage, and after an hour, the HD was converted.
• Then I could reinstall El Capitan from the same recovery mode.
• After the reinstall, everything was like it was.