I'm trying to recover data from a mac laptop hard drive that employs whole disk encryption. The original drive suffered a hardware failure, but we were able to clone 99.99% of the sectors onto a new drive. When the new drive is connected to our mac system (a Mac Mini running Yosemite) it prompts for the password which is known, but then just sits there endlessly accessing the drive. In disk utility it shows the drive and volume, when I run verify it says the disk needs to be repaired. When I run repair it fails, and says to "backup the data and format" (very funny haha).

I can't access it with data recovery software like Data Rescue 4 because it isn't fully mounted and is being endlessly accessed by the OS.

Also I'm trying (and failing) to get this Mac Mini to boot Diskwarrior 4.4 for some crazy reason. Won't boot form a CD or USB, though it will boot other utilities like the Data Rescue 4 USB.

Any thoughts?

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Oh, and I've tried mounting the LVM in terminal, but it says it times out while waiting to mount

I really hate all things Macintosh.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Update: Looks like Diskwarrior version 5 solved the issue. Just opening the program and not running any repairs yet, it mounted the volume in about two seconds. Odd, but I'm not complaining.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I had an almost identical problem though the drive was not encrypted and was external.
No way would the system boot with a 4.4 dvd. I must have wasted half the morning trying various methods. So just as you described I also used version 5 and it just mounted. I ran the repairs and it fixed everything.
I guess its a Yosemite thing?

I once had an encrypted disk, coming from a MacBook, which was healthy but encrypted.
When it was connected externally, the file system did not show at all and was not asking any password to mount.

Then, I put the drive in a MacBook of the same model, which started without problem and after typing the password gave access to the session where I could see and copy all files without problem.

Maybe are some hardware settings used for the encryption ; I don't know.

I currently have a drive with a quite similar issue:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32435