Been having a lot of problems with Filevault over the years. Now I’ve just discovered that you can no longer use the Filevault recovery keys in macOS 15.5. Instead, you are expected to boot to recovery, which is more of a pain. This removal is insane. Like many we use the stored key from Jamf to unlock devices in the event of account passwords not working. Now we have to use Recovery mode. I’d love to know Apple’s reasoning for this. Anyone else aware of this and have any comment?
Where did you get that this information from
Did you tried pressing Shift+Option+Return to get the Recovery key option on the login screen
Yes I have tried shift+option+return. That no longer works with macOS 15.5. All it does it take you to the login to enter an admin account, not the single recovery key windows as it did previously.
on the MacAdmins Slack others have confirmed similar issue. e.g:
"It seems macOS Sequoia 15.5, Apple has removed the ability to access the FileVault recovery key reset option at the login window. This change has been confirmed in Apple’s updated behavior around FileVault and password reset workflows, particularly in enterprise environments.”
I can’t find the offical Apple statement, but I’m not the only one who has seen it.
I gotta check this out for myself on a 15.5 macOS .
Why would Apple do something this stupid if it's true
Have started some more testing this morning. I can see that the issue I reported only appears to affect freshly setup or wiped devices. If the Mac has been upgrade to 15.5, then the Recovey login is avaialble. This might explain why other people have not seen the issue.
Just for clarification, on each affected device (intel and Apple Silicon) I have deleted the Jamf record before the erase/reinstall. As I’m setting these up with jamf, I think I’ll do a vanilla wipe and enable filevault and see what happens. Then I’ll know if it is s an Apple or a Jamf issue.
I’ve removed one of the problem devices from any prestage and factory reset to 15.5. Setup an account and manually turned on filevault. I can now see the ? icon and use recovcery key. So must be something in our Jamf settings.
Interesting. I’m not seeing this on a freshly setup 15.5 Apple Silicon MacBook Air. ? and Shift+Option+Return appear/work as expected.
In macOS 15.5 (Sequoia), you can no longer log in directly with a FileVault recovery key. Previously, pressing Option-Shift-Return at the boot screen would give you the option to enter a recovery key, but that has now been removed. From now on, you will need to go into macOS Recovery to use a recovery key.
You’ll have to take my word for it that this Mac is running Sequoia 15.5 and was setup yesterday.
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