I wanted to dual boot winxp (on C) and install win7 on D. So, I installed win7 on partition D, and once it was finished, I could not log into my winxp installation and no longer see the secureboot login asking for my passphrase. However, I can log into Win7 successfully.

Any ideas? The problem is that I’m not sure which version of PGP is on it, but I know it’s probably from 2008 or so since that’s when we bought the laptop. Would it be possible to install PGP on win7 and do something in order to allow me to boot into winxp again? Can I alter the boot.cfg?

Thanks

From what I understand, you’re now in a state where you can use the PGP recovery disk to reinstall the wrapper. Or, decrypt the drive using the recovery disk and reinstall the WDE.

Wenbo,

Sounds like you may have had a damaged disk. Sorry that you weren’t able to get everything back but hopefully you got something!

In your situation, you did fixmbr first, followed by a PGP decryption. In my case, because I don’t know if fixmbr will cause any problem to my encrypted HDD, so I just used a PGP recovery disk to decrypt the HDD. This step finished without any error. I connected the decrypted HDD to a windows machine. Windows recognized this HDD as an unformatted disk. I was really scared.

I tried many data recovery tools, only one of them (Dataexplorer) got some of my data back, most of my data is still missing. I wonder the decryption process wrote some HDD sectors and destroied some data.

I know your aren’t a driver recovery expert, so it’s fine if you can’t help. Thank you for your kind reply anyway.

I am by no means a drive recovery expert, but my understanding is that modifying the MBR won’t affect your data. It may render it inaccessible, but it is still there physically.

Regarding your situation, it sounds like the MBR is OK, but BootGuard (the PGP’s MBR wrapper) isn’t loading. I would try to use the PGP recovery disk on the drive first, ideally in your original machine.

I had a similar situation what you had. I have a SATA HDD which was encrypted by PGP v9.10. There was only one partion (C:) in that disk.

yesterday, for some reason, I removed the HDD from my machine. I’m sure I did everything right( I shut down Windows before I removed the HDD). Some time later, I installed the HDD to my machine again, I saw the message just like your ‘unable to find operating system’.

I got another Windows machine, cabled in my encrypted HDD with an IDE to USB adapter. This windows machine can recognize this HDD as a mass storage device, but windows just doesn’t think there is any partition (I can’t see this disk in the explorer). There is important data in this disk, so I’m very cautious in fixing this problem.

I guess this problem is related to MBR or partition table. but I dont know if the data will be corrupted if I follow your method (running fixmbr with windows recovery disk).

Any suggestions on this?

thank you in advance.

–Wenbo

Fortunately I haven’t had any more problems with PGP since this experience (probably cuz I switched to Truecrypt! Ha!)

But any “bad sectors” error sounds like you could have some physical damage. that may also have been the root cause of your corrupted DLL.

Hard to say, really. Did you try the steps from above?

However when connecting the old drive with a USB to the laptop, my documents and all other folders usually under your profile can not be seen. First time I actually saw what PGP does and it actually works to my frustration i mght add.

I asked how do i then copy over data from my old encrypted disk. they tried to decrypt but apparently it fails due to ‘bad sectors’ on the drive.

Any suggestions ?

The decryptation took 3 days. Intel core2 duo with 250Gb HDD