MacOS – Error restoring encrypted disk using Disk Utility

disk-utilitymacosrestoressd

I am trying to replace the hard drive in an old MBP-15 mid 2010 with a new SSD. The old disk is encrypted. I did that on my own two MBPs successfully, but both disks were not encrypted. The Mac is running OS X v10.10.5.

I reboot the friends MBP with CMD+R into Recovery Mode and run Disk Utility -> Restore with the old drive set as "source" and the new SSD set as "backup"

It runs for a few minutes, but then it fails with

RESTORE FAILURE
Could not restore - Device not configured

The SSD is brand new and connected to the Mac via USB.
Does anyone have an idea what is going on?

———- Solution ———–

Thanks for the answers. The simple solution was to exchange the original HD with the still empty SSD and run restore in that combination. I believe it may have been some kind of USB problem, maybe related to the different read / write speeds (slow reading, encrypted disk vs super fast SSD write). Not sure, but it worked. Cheers!

Best Answer

The outcome you're seeing is probably a (security) feature, not a bug. I would think that Disk Utility would prompt for a password to enable access to the encrypted drive before allowing it to be read in order to perform the restore. Before attempting the restore use the Terminal command string "diskutil corestorage unlockVolume UUID -stdinpassphrase" followed by the password to unlock the drive then see if your restore runs to completion.