[Tomchu]

So this is the last time I'm ever going to trust my data to a FAT32 volume. I have a portable hard drive formatted in FAT32 on which I also keep a few encrypted .sparseimage files. Today I tried to mount two of them, and OS X claims that they're corrupt. These same .sparseimage files stayed on my Mac Mini for a year with nary a problem. A week after I put them on a FAT32 drive ... ugh. The drive itself is fine, too.

I've Googled around, and it hasn't been very helpful. As a last resort, I'm thinking that I can do the following ...

- Strip out header/footer information from the .sparseimage file
- Run the resulting lump of data through openssl, decrypting it with an AES-128 cipher
- Run the resulting lump of decrypted raw filesystem data through FileJuicer to get some of my stuff back

I've already tried running the .sparseimage through openssl, but it doesn't work (as expected) because of what I suspect is extra information tacked on to the top of the file. Does anyone know how many bytes I need to strip away to get at the raw encrypted FS data?

[tightsocks]

How big were the .sparseimage files?

[Tomchu]

About 3 GB each.

[tightsocks]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

About 3 GB each.

So, damage probably wasn't the result of the .sparseimage file growing beyond the FAT32 4GB file-size limit...

This issue is actually probably over my head, but I did find an article that is sort of similar to your issue.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50326041757989

It is geared towards fixing a .sparseimage that is used as a FileVault home directory, but some of the techniques might be relevant. Especially the one about converting the .sparseimage to an unencrypted .dmg. That technique might be more successful than trying to run the .sparseimage through OpenSSL.

[Tomchu]

Thanks for the tip -- unfortunately, I've already tried the convert method. :-( It looks like this one is a goner.

Ah well. **** happens, life goes on. I won't mull over it any longer.