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My disk is formatted with Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted). I have a super long and random password. It won't let me paste my password in and I keep manually typing it wrong. There is nothing on this disk and I just need to changed the password to something that I can manually change. What do I do? Here is my dialog that I keep getting:

disk unlock password message

Anyone with any suggestions?

UPDATE: I do not care if I lose the data or not.

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Please clarify, do you know the password and this is about entering it correctly, or do you not know it an this is about explaining how forgetting encryption passwords is bad? –  Daniel Beck Jan 22 '13 at 6:22
I do not know the password. I do not care if I lose the data. –  Jason Silberman Jan 23 '13 at 2:22
Interesting. Usually you'd do this via Disk Utility, but it doesn't allow to partition locked (i.e. encrypted and not mounted) disks. Does this work? –  Daniel Beck Jan 23 '13 at 6:42
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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Good encryption allows for no recovery. That's how it protects your system from other people.

Encryption sounds like a good idea till you learn to live with it and take extra precautions to prevent the data loss it will force upon you in the event you lose the password. Upon covering all the bases it becomes a useful tool to prevent recovery of data from stolen equipment and not a liability from forgetting the password.

Various other operating systems allow for making a recovery disk or thumb drive when you first encrypt the disk that you can then store in a safe place in case this event happens.

The only recourse is to get it right at least once if you have it written down correctly.

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Not a solution for this question, but you're probably right. If the password is stored in the keychain, OSX allows for an admin password that can open the keychain as well. You can loose both of course. I recommend using a simple and easy to remember password for disk encryption, that others cannot guess easily. Why do you use this? To protect from the NSA or to protect from a friend or thief? In the latter two cases, a simple password will be sufficient. –  rxt Sep 10 '13 at 14:15
At the time I answered this little addendum wasn't there UPDATE: I do not care if I lose the data or not. The only solution is to wipe the disk which requires dropping down to OS level utilities to bypass the encryption checks or by mounting it under another OS. See @mpoisot's answer for that. –  Fiasco Labs Sep 22 '13 at 18:15
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Without the current password, you will have to erase and reformat the disk in Apple's Disk Utility. It is always a good idea to store these passwords in a safe place. Apple also allows you to store the key with them. See this article for more information.

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I have tried that, but it will not let me re-format the disk or erase the data. All the tabs in Disk Utility are greyed out –  Jason Silberman Jan 23 '13 at 2:25
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I had the same problem, and This SuperUser answer worked. Basically you get into the terminal and use diskutil directly to bypass DiskUtility's overprotection.

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