Either I'm In Need Of A Brain Reformat, Or...

[Dallas]

... Apple are having me on.

 

One of the external hard drives that I have been using over the past three years to store client work contains my Lightroom catalogs also. So this morning I thought I would install Lightroom onto the 5K iMac and open the catalog. No problem, done this before, I thought. Until I plugged the hard drive into the Mac and it asked me for a password. 

 

Huh?

 

I clicked on the password hint, saw something that pointed me in the direction of a typical password I have used in the past and got the dialog box to shake violently a few times. 

 

Huh? 

 

Tried again. Same result. And again, and again, and again. 

 

Took the hard drive to the other room where the old iMac is, plugged it in there and it opened it up, no password required. 

 

Now call me crazy, but surely if Apple KeyChain was saving this password I should be able to retrieve it from somewhere, right? 

 

Nope. No such luck. I tried more variations of passwords, and more still, but that stubborn little drive refused to open up on the 5K. 

 

Fortunately because I could still read it on the old machine (which thankfully I haven't sold yet) I was able to copy over all 1,8TB of files from there to another 4TB drive I was using as the Time Machine on the old iMac. That took practically all day. 

 

Has anybody ever had this happen with an encrypted drive on Apple before? Opens on one machine without password but not on another? 

[Mexecutioner]

Never had that happen.

 

So on the old machine you can't find the password in your keychain? Maybe you changed the name of the drive long time ago or have forgotten the password?

 

You can go to keychain access on the old machine and sort all login keychains by kind and see what you have under "encrypted volume password". If the drive mounts on that machine the password has to be stored there and you can double check what the volume name and password are.

 

 

[Dallas]

It is the most bizarre thing, Rodrigo. No sign of any encrypted drive in the keychain when it is plugged into the old Mac. It does open a dialog asking for a password but I click on the cancel button and it opens anyway. It doesn’t open on the new one though. But what surprises me most is that none of the password variations I use will open it on the new Mac. It can’t be anything other than the options I have input.

 

Needless to say I won’t be formatting any more drives with encryption in the future. 

[crowecg]

Maybe encrypted without a password?  Try hitting ok

[Dallas]

6 hours ago, crowecg said:

Maybe encrypted without a password?  Try hitting ok

 

I did that, no dice. 

 

Anyway, al the work is now copied over to the bigger drive, so I can reformat this older one now. Without any encryption.

[crowecg]

I’ve got a couple of things I can’t remember passwords for.  At the moment I can’t log into my router control panel, but at least I remember the wifi password.

[Dallas]

6 hours ago, crowecg said:

I’ve got a couple of things I can’t remember passwords for.  At the moment I can’t log into my router control panel, but at least I remember the wifi password.

 

I have developed a password "system" where I have a standard mixture of characters that satisfy the diversity requirements and I concatenate onto that something related to either the website or account I am trying to access. This has proven fairly useful over the past few years but this hard drive password has me stumped. I'm fairly sure that I am inputting the right thing, but for some reason it isn't accepting it. 

 

Router passwords are usually admin / admin but you can reset them easily enough with a pointy thing.