OSX Captain crashed

Hi,

There are a number of things you could try (also see offical Apple Support page: https://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT201255):

1. Recovery Mode: Hold down the Command and R keys as you switch on and hold them for 10 seconds. Since no recovery partition appears at startup, this may not work. You can boot into recovery mode over the internet too though: Hold down Command, Option, and R for that.
2. Safe Boot (with Verbose error-messaging): Hold down Shift, Command, and V keys as above.
3. Single User Mode: Hold down Command and S keys as above. Wait until the command-line prompt appears (after all the text is done scrolling past.) Then type fsck -fy and press Return. Eventually, after five different checks that take varying amounts of time, you should get to one of two messages: "The volume [your Mac's name] appears to be OK" or "FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED." If you encounter the first message, type reboot and press Return. If you see the latter message, though, you'll want to run fsck -fy all over again. You can retype the command and hit Return, or press the Up arrow once and then press Return.
4. NVRAM Reset: Hold down Command, Option, P and R keys as you switch on and hold them until you hear the restart sound a second time.
5. SMC Reset: This depends on which model of MBP you have: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

If one of these steps seems to be on the road to helping, but you are unsure how/if to proceed, get back in touch.

Do you have access to another Mac? This would give you quite a few other rescue avenues to explore...

Alternatively, since all the core2duo MBPs came with superdrives, do you know anyone with installation media?

Hi Max,

Thank you very much for your help!

As I found no way to recover with my previous installation, I had to start all over again.

But now I have a big concern, as I still can't access my external driver, as it is password protected and I can't remember the password. I set the password for the first time when I bought my macbook and never had to type it again, ever.

I already got in touch with the company LaCie to try to find a way of doing it. At first they gave me an impression it was possible, but now they say it is only an Apple issue, as the encryption software used is built from Apple.

Do you know if there any way I can get my data out of it? Change the password? Or anything else?

If not its a huge loss for me.

Thank you very much for your help.

Gustavo

That could be tough - the whole point of FileVault is to make it nearly impossible to access the data without the password. If you never had to type the password then that means that the access credentials were stored in the old OS - now erased as I understand you. The ony hope that I can see is that it was also stored in your "keychain" and that keychain was synced with iCloud. If so then first make sure that keychain is syncing with your new install and then open the "Keychain Access" app.

Let me know if you have any trouble getting to that stage.

Hi Max,

Thanks a lot for your help!

Lets check that. I checked out and iCloud stored some stuff, and keychain as well. At the Keychain Access App the only place I can see a reference to LaCie wes at he "iCloud" Keichains menu. The line says: www.lacie.com (Password not saved), Kind (Web form password).

I suppose it means my last chance is gone? Right? Is there any other place to look?

Thank you for everything.

The reference to LaCie you found was for the LaCie website - not your drive.

Have you written over the partition/drive that used to have your working Yosemite OS before the unfortunate attempted install of El Capitan?

Yes I have written over the same partition because I could not recover.

I've checked over the Apple support documention relevant to your situation and the only recovery key is created at the time you encrypt instead - this is stored locally on your OS partition and for you this is now gone sadly.

I've also looked at the main forums (discussions.apple.com, forums.macrumors.com etc.) for others with the problem you're facing, and I'm afraid there are no solutions for losing the password and the recovery key for an encrypted time-machine backup on a non-timecapsule external drive... Sorry

I have my fingers crossed that you maybe used the same password for something else around that time that you can find somehow. The Keychain access utility can be good for that - it stores a lot of passwords and there's an option to view them (requires your sys admin password from your new OS X install)

Best of luck...

Thanks a lot Max!

Best of luck to U2

Hi Max,

I am thinking in a possible solution. I have created a lot of different passwords from time to time. Usualy I create very big passwords. The one that forgot its probably around 40 characters, including uppercase, lowecase, numbers and special chars. I am creating a list of the probable passwords with this combination. I think the entire list is going to be bigger than 100 lines.

So I would like to try this passwords programaticly to try to unlock my external drive.

Would you have any tip on how to make this?

Thanks,

I would try the Automator app (don't know if you've used it before, but it comes with OS X). You can build up a sequence of automated actions by using the record button. You may have to learn a couple of Applescript basics too. They're both about as accessible to beginners as these things get, but you'll still have to put in some study to get to automate properly - to be honest, even if your list is 200 passwords or more, you'd probably be quicker doing it manually - but learning new skills is a reward in itself, so I don't want to discourage you.

Good Luck!

I'm afraid your list of passwords is going to be quite a bit longer than 100 lines. If you only include upper and lower case letters plus the digits 0-9, that is 62 characters. For a 40 character password if you don't repeat any character, that would be approximately 2.78E+64 passwords or 3, followed by 64 zeros. Of course if you include special characters it would be much larger and if you allowed repeats,… well you get the idea.

Well, yes, if you're brute-forcing it without any clue as to what "chunks" you might have used/reused from other passwords, you can save youself some time and give up now.

well good luck.

I think you should check the KeyChain Access app again. The entry you're looking for won't be LaCie, but will likely contain the name that you gave to the drive - which may be the name that appears in Finder when it's plugged in. Either way, you can select "All Items" in the sidebar for each of the Keychains listed in the top left and then, each time you select a new keychain, scroll down the list looking for something that might be it.