MacOS – Can’t turn on FileVault after restore from Time Machine

filevaultmacosrecovery

I have bought myself a SSD and replaced the internal disk with it.
I was running Lion before (latest patch level).
I'm using Time Machine to back my laptop up.

When I was done replacing my HDD I booted up a Lion installation USB stick.
I created one partition on my SSD and told it to restore from my Time Machine backup.

This worked great,
however I also want to again turn on FileVault and I'm getting the error:

FileVault can’t be turned on for the disk “Macintosh HD”.
Some disk formats don’t support the recovery partition required by encryption.
To use encryption, reinstall this version of Mac OS X on a reformatted disk.

I've read that this is because I'm now missing the recovery partition (Didn't even know I had that).

  • What are my options here?
  • Can I create this partition manually?

Do I need to reinstall Lion again (cleanly), patch it, and then restore from Time Machine?

Best Answer

From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790

FileVault 2 requirements

FileVault 2 requires OS X Lion and Recovery HD installed on your startup drive, which the OS X Lion installer will attempt to create at installation. If you receive an alert that no Recovery HD could be created and continued to install OS X Lion, you will be unable to use FileVault 2. See this article for more information. Please note that Recovery HD must be present on your computer's startup volume to use FileVault 2 (not an external Recovery HD).

Also, if you partitioned the new SSD yourself, ensure that you used the GUID partition table scheme.

Re-installing lion over the top of your existing install will recreate it for you.

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