FileVault issues with Catalina

Two major FileVault issues exist with Catalina at present. The first one has been ongoing; it will rear its head if you have multiple FileVault-enabled Catalina drives, as will be the case if you're also beta-testing Carbon Copy Cloner. When booting from one Catalina drive (doesn't matter if internal or external), only the System volume of the other one will auto-mount. This is not apparent if you're only looking at the display in Finder, you can see it in Disk Utility. Manually mounting the Data volume will work. However, if you then unmount the System volume (as CCC will do after applying a system update), you're subject to a kernel panic.


The second one has been introduced in DP6. Now FileVault cannot be enabled at all on an external ⚠ drive that has a Catalina installation. When booted from the external drive, an attempt to turn on FileVault will throw an error, that blames your configuration in Security & Privacy>Privacy>Files and Folders. This message appears to be nonsense. Note that this pertains only to enabling FileVault in the first place, not to a drive that is already encrypted (which is simply subject to Issue #1.)


As a topper on the second issue with DP6, when booted from the external drive, the boot device displays in Finder not as a "drive", but as a generic file icon.


I have, of course, filed both issues with Feedback. Just giving a heads-up here. :-)

  • So two years later, I’ve had to disable FileVault in order to boot up my machine a day after upgrading to Catalina, been in touch with Apple Support for two hours to finally get back into my Mac and now after a couple of hours of use my keyboard has been disabled again so I can’t properly save my work! I think this was triggered because my external Time Machine drive is still encrypted when my internal drive is not so I’m attempting to reformat my TIME MACHINE drive using DISK UTILITY, obviously losing all my backups, so I can hurry to back up my machine in case my Mac shuts down without warning overnight to install some other dodgy updates therefore totally locking me out since none of my keyboards are allowed to work if anything is encrypted, thanks to Catalina still not being fixed after all this time. What a headache. I was told to update my operating system because of ransomware threats only to find Apple’s own operating system potentially holding my data ransom, as I no longer have proof of purchase and the guy at Support said I may have to bring the machine to a store to update firmware. Why hasn’t this been mentioned before we upgrade so we can wait until Apple get their software working properly? Very frustrated here now.

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Future Jerry: appears resolved in DP7. Just left with that funky generic file icon representing the boot volume, when it’s external.