I am running Windows 7 64 bit on a Thinkpad T420. Whole Disk PGP encryption was done on HDD (Seagate Momentus) using PGP version 10.3.0.9307 (MP3). I booted the machine a few days ago, got the PGP bootguard and entered my password. That worked fine, however Windows did not boot up properly and I got the Windows recovery screen with about 5 recovery options ranging from repairing the system, restoring an image or opening a command prompt. After trying few things to restore OS, I opened the command window and entered "bootrec /fixmbr". When I rebooted I got a"Missing operating system" error message. I Can't reach Boot guard screen now. Is there any way I Can recover the Data, gave HDD to external vendor but they are also unable to recover. Needless to say, drive has important data.
So after going through forums, I tried to use PGP (same version) on Other machine and using Bad HD as secondary and run some PGP utilities to recover. Using Win HEX tool, I can find some entries for BGFS (Screenshots available) however, I guess HD has bad sectors, that is why recovery is not going through.
1. Is there any Option which can be passed to PGPWDE to skip bad sectors ?
2. Disk has 2 partitions, Is it possible to recover at least from One Partition ( In Active Ones) ?
3. What is the best Way to "Clone" the PGP Encrypted disk to experiment further ? Casper ??
Has anyone experience of this problem ? and a fix for it ? It will be great if someone can provide me way forward.
Thanks & Best regards,
DJS
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c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --version --disk 1
Symantec Drive Encryption, Version 10.3.0 (Build 9307)
Copyright (C) 2013 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved.
Request sent to Version was successful
c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --status --disk 1
Disk 1 is not instrumented by bootguard.
Request sent to Disk status was successful
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c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --enum --disk 1
Total number of installed fixed/removable storage
device (excluding floppy and CDROM): 2
Managed disks:
Disk Group bcbaa5b2-f84c-43a1-afc9-d02d60e21873:
Disk 0 has 1 online volumes:
volume C:\ SYSTEM is on partition 1 with offset 2048
Unmanaged disks:
Disk 1 has 0 online volumes:
Request sent to Enumerate disks was successful
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c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --info --disk 1
Disk information for disk 1.
Model Number: Jmicron Corp. USB Device
Total number of sectors on disk: 976771072
Request sent to Display disk information was successful
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c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --list-users --disk 1
No users found!
Request sent to List users on disk was successful
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c:\Program Files (x86)\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop>PGPwde.exe --recover --disk 1 -p "passphrase"
4314112 sectors searched, 972456960 sectors to go
4315136 sectors searched, 972455936 sectors to go
4316160 sectors searched, 972454912 sectors to go
ERROR: read failed, number of sectors searched so far: 4316576
Could not locate valid BGFS record
Recovery failed!
Operation recover disk failed:
Error code -11990: read failed
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