• Trust yourself
• Break the rules
• Don't be afraid to fail
• Don't listen to the naysayers
• Work like hell
• Give something back

Edit: I came across the post from the EFF New Year's Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own and decided to write my experience with full disk encryption on Lion

As I sit down and write this post, I am currently vacationing with my wife's family in a remote town in Colombia. I recently purchased a Mercury 3G SSD from Other World Computing. I am running 10.7.2 on my macbookpro and right before my trip down here, I ran out of battery power and the computer saved its state ( like it is supposed to do and has done several times before ).

I had not used my computer for a few days and my wife and her brother let me know about a bug in a weather application I wrote. So I dug out my computer and tried to boot it up. Normally when you have filevault2 enabled, before the computer can boot you have to select a user account and enter the password.

This time when I would enter my password, I would see the Apple logo flash for a second and I was back to the same "pre boot" screen I was at previously. If I subsequently tried to to log in, I would just see the Apple logo and a mouse cursor and then nothing else would happen.  If I would move the cursor around the screen and it would "paint" or "reveal" the screen underneath ( much like a lottery scratch ticket ). Booting up with Command-V didn't do much as I couldn't read the error fast enough.

I then attempted to use the Lion recovery disk recovery mechanism (Command-R). Most of the time, I was unsuccessful as the Apple logo would turn into a Circle with a slash and go back to the initial login (pre boot) screen.  Once the recovery partition booted up, I could unlock the main partition and browse  the files in Terminal just fine. But when I attempted to restart the computer by selecting the startup disk, I wouldn't have any luck either.

I then attempted to restore my lion install by reinstalling over the internet.  For some reason, "downloading additional files" was downloading 3.794 GB. Since I am in the remote town in colombia, the only place for wifi access was a short walk to the town park. I believe the internet here is a satellite link so downloading a full 3.794 isn't practical and the wifi would drop and the Lion installer would attempt to re download the files all over again rather than pick up where it left off. After about two days or so of trying to download the files I gave up and starting looking on how to remove the device encryption hoping that was the cause of all of my problems.

So after searching the internet I came upon a post on how to encrypt and decrypt your drive using diskutil  Unlock or decrypt your FileVault 2-encrypted boot drive from the command line and decrypted my partition and then restarted. I also want to note that the diskutil coreStorage list command would still list the partition as decrypting even though "all bytes" had finished decrypting. I waited a few minutes after I thought the decrypting process should have finished and restarted.

I thought my computer was hosed because during the boot process, the Apple Logo would swap rapidly to the circle with a slash in it to a folder with a question mark.  After about a minute of watching that, I turned off the computer for another minute and restarted. This time, i saw the same image swapping behavior ( without the folder ) for about 5 to 6 seconds before the Apple logo appeared and I saw a spinner animating underneath it.

At this point I could log in and my state was restored to whatever I was doing a few days ago. I went into the System Preferences->Security & Privacy->FileVault and I saw an animating progress bar with the label "decrypting" with no estimated time. So I restarted again by selecting the startup disk in System Preferences->Startup Disk and everything booted up normally. The boot process was normal and I was able to login and saw the option to encrypt my drive and promptly left that option alone. I rebooted a couple of more times to make sure the normal boot up process wasn't a fluke and called my repair a success.

I realize this post is a bit on the long side, but I wanted to provide as much detail as I could while this experience was fresh in my mind.  Usually I take along a external hard drive that has the Lion installer and an Lion installation on it in case I have problems, but I screwed up and left it back in Omaha. So after this experience, I'm not sure about device encryption on my laptop. I get the security reasoning and all of that, but I wouldn't wish this experience on anyone. So for me, I will rely on remotely wiping my drive in case of theft and a password on my screen save or upon wake ( which is what I do anyway ).

Dear Steve,

I am a person that has just learned of your untimely death.  We have never met, but you have changed my life.  Your attention to detail, patience and culture you have instilled at Apple is an inspiration to many.  I would watch your keynotes with an anticipation like a child ripping open presents on Christmas Day.  I admire you for your standards, passion and for the soul you give your products.  I feel honored to have watched and listened to you while you gave your presentations at WWDC. It is time for the rest of us to pick up where you left off and make a difference in people's lives.

Rest in peace man, You've earned your rest.

Sincerely ,

Hasani Hunter

In some way, it is comforting for me to listen to my three year old son laughing while watching Toy Story and to reflect on the impact that Steve Jobs has had upon millions of lives.

I absolutely agree with everything in Adam Schepis post Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto. He touches on a lot of great points like:

If you screw up at your job you can always get another one, but if you screw up your family, especially your relationship with your children, it will stay with you and stay screwed up forever.