Is it possible to password protect an external (Seagate) USB 2TB drive that is already partitioned and has data on it? Or do you have to entirely delete the drive first? I hope it can be done. Thank you in advance for any responses.
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Password Protect USB Drive Without Erasing?
- Thread starter Christopher11
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Hey, thank you! Trying to do this and created the password, however, it's telling me "couldn't unmount disk".
Okay, tried again and now Blue 2 is gone. I guess it unmounted. Is it a process that takes a while?
However, Blue 1 is still mounted, and when I control click it doesn't give me an option to Encrypt as Blue 2 did.
However, Blue 1 is still mounted, and when I control click it doesn't give me an option to Encrypt as Blue 2 did.
Yeah, they're both mounted now but alas, no encryption. Maybe it's not the right kind of formatting? Here's a
![Screen Shot 2022-09-25 at 5.08.12 PM.png]( "Screen Shot 2022-09-25 at 5.08.12 PM.png")
screenshot.
Sometimes it can take a while to unmount a disk. Is there were no data on Blue 2, the quickest way to encrypt it would be to reformat. But because there is data, encrypting just takes time, maybe even a few days. You can monitor the progress in Terminal by typing...
diskutil list
In the output from this command it should show the encryption progress in percentage. Be patient. As I said, it might take a day or more to complete.
diskutil list
In the output from this command it should show the encryption progress in percentage. Be patient. As I said, it might take a day or more to complete.
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Oh! I see. I will leave it overnight tonight. However, why did it mount back up unencrypted? Also, why doesn't it show an option to encrypt Blue 1?
Thank you sincerely for responding.