Mounting a "Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)" drive formatted in Lion on either Mac OS X Leopard or CentOS 6

I formatted a Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive on a system running OS X Lion (10.7) as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)". Everything works great on the Lion system.

However, when I try to mount the drive on a system running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), it can't mount the drive; it complains that the drive cannot be read (I do not have the exact error message in front of me ATM).

I've also tried to mount the drive in my CentOS VM using the hfsplus module, but it can't find the HFS+ superblock. I've mke2fs -n'd it to see if it can find an alternate superblock location, but none of the ones it found seem to work.

Is there a way to mount a drive formatted by an OS X Lion system as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)" on a system running either Mac OS X Leopard or CentOS 6?

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, Apple introduced a new technology called Core Storage to handle the new full disk encryption. You can read about it in John Siracusa's review of OS X Lion. This new type of volume cannot be read yet by other OS versions, but I'm sure some third party will eventually create some software that will enable reading these volumes on other operating systems.