File Share Encryption

Hello, I am using a recovery CD to decrypt a master HDD 500GB. How long time it will last? After more than an hour it seems that there are still 99% encrypted. Is there a problem? Thanks a lot. Regards.

It can take a few days.  This 700 GB disk on a high end machine takes 5 days (the CD decryption is only 16 bit processing).  Sometimes that percentage encrypted doesn't give an adequate report, so I wouldn't be concerned about it.  The CD decryption must not be stopped before it completes, still has 1% left to decrypt when it first shows 0%, and PGP will state that it is complete when it is.

There is any other way to decrypt disks faster?

Other question: When a computer is encrypted and I can't boot up, what is the best way to do a checkdisk?

When you are able to boot into Windows and do the decryption with PGP Desktop, it is much faster.  If you can't boot, you have the option of gaining the same result by attaching your disk, such as via USB from an external casing, to a computer with PGP installed and decrypting it from that computer's PGP Desktop.

I don't know that you can use Checkdisk for that.  However, a SpinRite tech has advised that their software can be successfully used even on encrypted disks. 

so I originally started to encrpt my Hard Drive on my latop and it froze so after trying to restart it where it left off it seemed to mess up the booting of My 64 bit version of Windows 7 Pro.  The original encryption only got to 58% completed so now I am running the decrpt option using the recovery CD it still state the 58% encrypted.  Will that screen actually state how much % is left. 

Will this really take a few days to decrypt the drive.  it is roughly 450 GB Drive.  what is the  x GB per hour calulations.  I know it depends on a few fators but what is the average.  Fairly beefy work laptop.

Based on my experience above, it would be a CD decrypt rate of about 5.8 GB per hour.  Your decryption will probably reflect the correct percentage, but sometimes it might fail to show the correct percentage while all the system is focused on the actual work of decryption.  If your drive only has to decrypt 58% of 450 GB, that would be 261 GB, with a roughly estimated time of 45 hours.  I'm guessing 50 hours would be more likely since my experience was with a high end machine, and I think it was actually a few hours over 5 days.

Use the Recovery CD as last resort, since it is very slow as everyone else has stated.

I'd recommend trying the decryption through WinPE before using the Recovery CD, see http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO64225

From my observation, I didn't see a significant performance decrease in using WinPE vs decrypting natively in Windows. It all took roughly the same amount of time.

Do you need further assistance with this?