Last week my hard drive crashed which was encrypted by PGP WDE. My hard drive does not boot. I tried installing my crashed hard drive and using PGP disk recovery. PGP recovery gave me error could not read or something like that. It does not recognize the crashed hard drive. I have very important information on my hard drive. Please let me know if there is a way I can retrieve data from crashed drive.

Thanks

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH149631

I’m going to experiment but perhaps adding the instrument would have done me…

Instrument a Disk – Adds the PGP bootguard for encryption.
pgpwde –instrument –disk 0

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH149100

Ok So I get the recovery cd after finding which one I need. I boot. I get the error, pgp recovery disk could not recognize PGPWDE installation.

So someone thought maybe the HD controller card took a dump. I swapped em with an identical one. Same error.

Trying to get help from Symantec is like pulling nose hair. It hurts!

I think this product is a huge waste of time. Going back to HD Bios passwords. Even after I spent all this money on this product hd pwasord are free, easy and if I fuck upa password I can get my data by changing the controller card.

I also think Symantec needs to stop buying perfectly good companies and destroying them.

Sorry to rant but Symantec won’t let me post on their forum.

Our dumb IT is suggestng that thet are not able to decrypt the system,so all your data will be lost and gone forever.

Any suggestions guys to release me from this unwanted tension………mail me at summichadha@gmail.com

I found out from PGP that doing this archive within Windows meant that the data I backed up up was no longer encrypted. This is true because I can mount the image and see the files. Should have been Imaging from the Acronis boot CD instead to maintain encryption.

We were running version 9 of PGP so I downloaded the latest PGP version 10.1, uninstalled PGP 9, rebooted, installed 10.1 and started encrypting the disk. When it finishes 5 hours later, all is well until boot time. Now I get an error MBR1, MBR2, MBR3 and press any key to boot from floppy message. Ran Fixmbr and Fixboot again to get NTLDR not found error.

So, I end up restoring my pre-encrpted Image to get the system running again but, I cannot get the system to boot after encrypting the disk. I also tried creating a BartPE installation with the PGPFIXMGR executable and ran that. Still will not boot. Have not removed the Dell diagnostic partition since this was not an issue before I had to recover the disk.

Any help is appreciated.

I used a non-PGP system, a USB caddy and the FAU dd.exe to image the entire drive onto a new hard disk and am currently using a PGP system to decrypt the new clone disk. PGP recognises it fine.

The FAU dd.exe is a great tool where you have a disk which doesn’t work well, as it only has to read each sector successfully once, wheras the PGP decrypt process has to read and write every sector, and then you have to copy the data afterwards. I understand there is one called dd_recover for linux designed specifically for this scenario but I have never used that.

dd.exe is available from:
http://gmgsystemsinc.com/fau/

BTW the command line used was:

dd.exe if=\\.\PhysicalDrive1 of=\\.\PhysicalDrive2 conv=noerror –localwrt –verbose –lockin –lockout

I used winobj to verify the correct Physical Drive names to use.

Bizarrely when I imaged the physical drive from a computer with PGP installed, after entering the passphrase for the damaged disk, the new image appeared to be already unencrypted. That wasn’t what I was expecting, so I terminated the process and imaged the disk from a non-PGP system instead.

You may find that if you use dd to clone a disk from a computer with PGP installed you get decrypted data and it may work fine for you. If it happens again (and I suspect it just has, to one of our other computers) I will try that.