Macworld - USA (2019-12-B)

148 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2019

HELPDESK MAC 911

Trouton’s solution—for which he thanks
the excellent MacAdmins group (go.
macworld.com/mcad) for “identifying and
testing”—involves resetting the password
for all existing accounts through a Terminal
command initiated in macOS Recovery. It’s
not hard to do, even though it sounds
convoluted:

1. Restart your Mac and hold down
   Command-R to start up in macOS
   Recovery.


2. From the Utilities menu, select
   Terminal.


3. Enter the command
   resetFileVaultpassword and press
   return. It may take a moment for a dialog
   box to appear.


4. In the Reset Password dialog box,
   set a password for every macOS account;
   the display is a little different if you have a
   single account or multiple accounts on the
   machine. You can even re-enter the
   current password, which counts as
   “resetting” it.


5. When you’ve completed changing
   the only or all passwords, you can click
   Restart for a single account or Next for
   multiple accounts.


6. After macOS starts up, open the
   Security & Privacy preference pane, and
   click the FileVault tab.


7. Click the lock at the lower-left corner
   of the pane and enter your administrative
   password.


8. The Turn On FileVault button should
   now be available to click. Click it and
   follow the normal procedure for enabling
   FileVault.
   I discovered in my testing that while
   all the above worked correctly and the
   secure token was re-enabled, the
   FileVault progress bar said encryption
   was “paused.” However, after restarting
   my Mac manually, I used the Terminal
   command fdesetup status, which
   reveals the current percentage
   completion of FileVault’s conversion, and
   it was both greater than zero and
   growing as I checked it over time.
   Eventually, the preference pane began
   to show progress and provide an
   estimate of time remaining. ■

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