Hi,
I'm using Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.0
One day my laptop started to be very slow. I shut it down (it took 2.5hrs) - but it did shut down correctly.
When I restarted it, I went through the bootguard prompt but after the windows logo I would only end up in a black screen with mouse.
I tried all possible options and techniques reliant on the "F8" functions - but nothing. Even safe mode could not be loaded.
Further work to fix the OS could be done with some tools - however due to the WDE it is not possible to load them.
So I started to find a way to decrypt the drive.
As I was in a hurry I tried to decrypt it using the bootable recovery CD (yes, I used the exact version as showed in bootguard)
After leaving the decrypt running for 15 hours - it was still at 99% (I.e. only 1% completed). Unfortunately many of the advice given in the forums by Symantec employee where simply incorrect and misleading - which made things worst. Telling that the process on a SATA disk would take 5-8 days it's BULL.
After 17 hours and no progress (I was waiting as, again, an employee in a post said that sometime the % doesn't get updated, again, not sure if it's true in the slightest).
I had no choice but shut down the machine. Most likely a bad sector was stopping the decryption to proceed. Considering that there few and negligible bad sectors, if the Recovery CD is really incaple of identifying a bad sector and somehow "skipping it" .. then I'm a bit scared of continuing to use this tech in the future.
FINALLY:
I imaged a new hard drive with same OS, installed the same version of PGP -- it asked for the passphrase, however it doesn't really show the filesystem or data.
The PGP console says that it's 100% encrypted and will just hang or "continue forever" to do nothing if you ask to decrypt.
I have been trying to use data recovery tools (only from Windows *sigh*) to get something back - but it doesn't seem to come through.
Considering that I check the drive - and the bad sector are NOT the cause of the data loss, but clearly the effect of bad sector on the encryption.
MY QUESTION IS:
- How do I decrypt the disk ? It just doesn't decrypt it. See below some more info.
C:\Program Files\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop\WinPE>PGPwde.exe --status --disk 2
I get an "integrity check failed (error= -11446)" in a popup
Disk 2 is instrumented by bootguard. Encryption removal process is running in the background.
Current key is valid.
Drive encrypted
Total sectors: 625140400 lowwatermark: 3453 highwatermark: 625140398 reserved
start sectors: 2
Request sent to Disk status was successful
- If there is a bad sector separating the inital part, let's say 1%, which is already decrypted, isn't there a way to "skip" some bad sectors and ask PGP to manually continue to decrypt the rest of the disk ?
In theory I could even idenify the specific sectors which are bad.
Thanks to any help I could get. Unfortuanately the data I lost was very valuable and not backed up.