Drive Encryption not recognizing Passphrase

[Scott Falk]

Hello,
I'm running Desktop 10.4.0 (build 1100).  I have a 5TB external drive that I thought I would try encrypting for the first time. I was using my personal key with a passphrase. I started several times, only to have it fail at different points. And when I went to access the drive to try again, I would be prompted for my passphrase. I would enter it, and it would error out saying it was incorrect. Each time I would have to go and delete the partition, recreate it and try again.  More recently, I started the process again, and so far it has been going without crashing. I'm at 30% right now (3 days in so far with 10 days estimated to go). Windows wants to reboot, so I went to pause the encryption process and I was prompted for my passphrase. I entered it, and it again says it is wrong. I know my passphrase. I needed it to start the process in the beginning. I know I'm not typing it wrong (I've even checked Show Characters and verified). I have no clue why it isn't recognizing. So far it is still encrypting, but I'm afraid that I'm going to either have Windows reboot automatically and break something, or I'm going to get to the end of the process and still not have access.

Any ideas as to what is going on?

TIA
Scott

[Scott Falk]

Well, my computer auto rebooted last night while I was at work. And now the encryption has auto-paused and I can't access the resume because it keeps saying my passphrase is incorrect. I'll wait a bit more for a reply here before I go back to deleting the partition, again, and starting over.

[Scott Falk]

Just for reference, during all these trials, I was encrypting to my private key.

I've deleted the partition and created two new ones. A smaller one, 1GB, and the rest as it's own. I tried to encrypt the 1GB partition with my private key (since it only would take 3 minutes) and once again, my passphrase was not recognized after it finished encrypting. So I deleted the partitions, and set them up again.

This time, I tried encrypting to a passphrase only, instead of my key. The encryption completed, and the drive opened up. I added a test text file to the drive just for testing purposes. Then unmounted and remounted the external drive. I was prompted for my passphrase, I entered it, and the drive showed up. BUT, it was no longer formatted. I was being told that in order to use the drive I needed to format it. So what happened? It was formatted before, had a file on it, and worked. After a remount it was gone!  So, I formatted it and added another test file. Unmounted, remounted, entered my passphrase, and the drive accessed and my file was there.

So, private key encryption is failing. Generic passphrase encrypting works, but you have to unmount, remount, and format before you can truly use the drive. This doesn't sound like normal behavior.