Cannot remove Encrypted Volume after Mountion Lion Rebuild

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I recently rebuilt my Mountain Lion build on my main Macbook Pro - mainly because I’d broken it while messing around with some beta software. A risk you take I guess. Anyways, I ran in to an oddity with a couple of encrypted drives - first one had FileVault enabled, and the TimeMachine drive had previously been encrypted. Essentially, Disk Utility wouldn’t let me repartition them - the options were greyed out:



The drive would let you erase, but you couldn’t repartition. If you tried to re-use it for TimeMachine it would want to go through a length decrypt process first..Not pleasant. Essentially the problem comes down to the encrypted volumes containing Core Storage volume groups - you cannot partition the drive while these are present.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way around this in Terminal. Fire up terminal and type in this command:

diskutil cs list

This will present you with a list of the core storage volumes, similar to this:



Select and copy the UUID from the logical volume group at the top - that’s what we want to delete:



So to delete that group, use the following command:

diskutil cs delete UUID Copied from earlier

..so for mine, the command would be:

diskutil cs delete ABA216B2-08C5-4E60-99BC-D61F98422176

Running this command deletes the volumes:



You can now go on and partition the drive how you require.

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