External PGP WDE Disk UNMOUNTABLE 10.7.5 & PGP 10.2.1 MP4
Created: 22 Oct 2012 | Updated: 22 Oct 2012 | 5 comments
I cannot see my 1TB external drive. I was in the past, prior to updating PGP to 10.2.1 MP4 able to force PGP to challenge me for the password by powering on the drive after my system was booted and logged in. Now it won't do that. My only recourse at this time is to delete the drive and restore my backup from my online backup solution.
I will continue to use PGP for the boot disk but I do not trust PGP anymore to guard my external drives. And while I am on that subjuct, I just connected a new 1TB drive to my system and was unable to get PGP to recognize that NON PGP drive so that I could encrypt the drive with PGP.
This not acceptable. Symantec has progessively broken PGP. First we lost the ability to encrypt drives as I mentioned above, and that eventually was fixed. Then we lost the ability to automaticallymount PGP encrypted drives. That has never been fixed. Now I cannot force PGP to mount an encrypted disk. I have lost access to my data. You the user of PGP make your own determination whether you are being well cared for as a PGP user.
Just so you know, I had no trouble using TrueCrypt to encrypt the drive that PGP would not see. I will restore my backup and when I delete the partition on my currently unmountable PGP drive, I will also encrypt it with TrueCrypt. It saddens me that a fine product that PGP used to be has not deteriorated into a product that I cannot rely upon. Sad.
Discussion Filed Under:
Comments 5 Comments • Jump to latest comment
Sandy has come and gone and almost two weeks have passsed since I posted this yet I see no reply nor promise of fixing PGP has come forth. Just so you know it took me almost a week to download 1TB of my backed up data thank you to CrashPlan. When PGP was owned by Zimmerman we never had these issues. One would have thought a huge company like Symantec would do a better job than Zimmerman's PGP. Sadly the answer is no. I'm writing this tonight because I'm about to blow away my PGP encrypted external disk (the one I cannot mount anymore) and replace the encryption with TrueCrypt where there is no company behind the product, other than the open source community. While PGP has gotten bigger in terms of ownership reliability has diminished. TrueCrypt on the other hand isn't owned by anyone and its reliability has been stellar. Thanks so much for nothing Symantec.
We shall see if this TECHNICAL info from me will help Symantec fix what they broke. Tonight I tried to remove the PGP partition on my external drive but that failed. I couldn't do anything. In order not to destroy disks that were running, I removed all other disks from my system so that I could focus on the correct 1tb external drive. In removing the disks, I was able to mount my PGP external disk. Fine - I started to decrypt it using PGP desktop so that I could replace it with a Truecrypt encrypted partition. It started to decrypt. As soon as I plugged in my 2 1tb drives attached to an external device that creates a RAID ARRAY, PGP desktop disappeared and I couldn't tell if it was decrypting or not.
So I turned off the Raid array and rebooted. Again I was able to mount my PGP drive and I resumed decrypting. I am formatting the PGP partition as I write this and 0 writing the disk to remove the data. I'm still waiting a day to decrypt the entire partition so I can put TrueCrypt on it. I hope this helps your engineers and helps others who also find their disks unmountable. While I will continue to use PGP to encrypt my bootable 1TB harddrive in my Mac, only because there is not other solution, I will not use PGP to encrypt any external drives as it is now unstable due to the changes Symantec made to the product. I will use the product only where it is stable.
How very typical of Symantec to totally ignore me. Thanks for the great support Symantec. You broke an enterprise product. Kudos.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news Pistonpilot but PGPWDE does not (and has not) supported RAID on a mac. Please see the release notes here:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/resources...
As you may already know. I have an open bug filed on the problem with mounting external firewire drives inside Mac OSX and the requirement to unplug and plug it back in several times in order to get the passphrase prompt. This issue only seems to occur on certain MacBook Pro models but Engineering is looking into it. Was this a firewire drive that you were using?
Just a word of advise, as I can understand your frustration given that it sounds like you have been a very long term PGP user and you are not happy with the state that Symantec has the product in today. But many of the people on the forums are here to help. Many of us (with an exception of the few) are here to work on the forum during our freetime. As such, people don't mind helping. But you need to give them the opportunity to help. For some reason your post was buried under several other threads and might have gotten overlooked. My apologies for that. I know that Symantec is very heavily focused (today) on fixing the issues that exist with Mac and give it a priority. Please take that for what it's worth and that things have certainly changed since it was PGP but we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have.
Feel free to message me if you feel there is an important issue that needs attention. I'm more than willing to help.
If/when you consider your issue resolved, please click Mark As Solution on the most helpful response.
PGP_Ben FAIL.
You should scroll up and read what I wrote. I never wrote that I expected PGP to encrypt a RAID array.
I stated clearly that mounting my external raid array on a raid device affected PGP. Where was I unclear? Why didn't you read what I wrote? Please don't tell me Symantec is focused on the product when months go by with no fix. Your words are wonderful if true, but they are not true and my experience is based on fact.
You had a working product. You broke a working product. When you break it, it stays broken for months. What really gets my gall, is that you all act as if you are doing us a favor by communicating with us. The word for that is arrogance. Also, I told you that I cannot mount my FIREWIRE an my USB external drives. Neither will mount.
As it stands now, the only drive I own that has PGP on it, is my internal Mac Drive. I have wiped all the others and EASILY encrypted them with TrueCrypt. I can no longer count on PGP for my encryption needs other than my internal mac drive. I'll continue to use it for that purpose until you break it.
Would you like to reply?
Login or Register to post your comment.