We had a Firewire 800 drive botch when it came to whole-volume encryption in Mac OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion. We lost the password and couldn’t recover it. The drive refused to erase, all the options were grayed out. I refuse to believe that a software change can render hardware junk, so there had to be a way, and I found it. Here’s the procedure:
- Attach botched drive to computer, since the password won’t work, cancel the unlock dialog box
- Open Terminal
- Enter command: diskutil CoreStorage list
- You will get a long list, you are looking for the UUID of the “Logical Volume Group” at the very top of the list, for the drive that is affected.
- Enter command: diskutil CoreStorage delete [UUID]
- The system will eject the volumes, destroy the grouping, erase the disk, then initialize the disk, mount it and finish.
- Done!