Open Radar

 
Summary: Unicode characters in encryption passwords cause disks to become unusable, and unfixable with Disk Utility.

Steps to Reproduce: In Disk Utility (in my case, while booted from the Mountain Lion installation image), select a logical volume on a disk and erase with options HFS (Journaled, Encrypted). When prompted for a password, enter a password with unicode characters (in my case, characters used were §, «, and »). Proceed.

Expected Results: An encrypted volume with a secure password requiring key-combinations such as alt+shift+\ to input.

Actual Results: Disk Utility provides an error message to the effect of "Not enough free space to create this volume." and fails. Doubly puzzling, as the drive had a single logical volume that was being replaced, so free space was not an issue. After dismissing the error dialog, the drive reverts to a state similar to an existing FileVault volume before unlocking. All options on the Erase and Restore tabs are grayed out when the disk is selected and there is no unlock option in the menus to reactivate the disk for editing. The logical volume in the left pane disk tree disappears. Booted from a SuperDuper! backup, opened Disk Utility. Same problems persist (no ability to work with disk, acts as if locked, no ability to unlock, no logical volumes displayed under disk in left pane tree). 

Regression: Opened Terminal, ran `sudo newfs_hfs /dev/disk0s2` which scrapped the entire disk, causing the previous disk to disappear from the left pane tree, to be replaced with a disk displaying the hardware's model name (no name was provided to newfs_hfs, so the disk is unlabeled). Proceed to work with the disk in Disk Utility as normal.

Notes: Unicode characters cause every aspect of OS X's passwords to fail, as far as I can tell. I've had problems with the Keychain and system User Accounts in the past. Unicode support seems to be 100% missing from the core of the OS.