File Share Encryption

I recently installed PGP WDE 10.1.1. I went through the PGP WDE best practices, and one of it was to create a recovery disk. I followed the instructions on how to create the recovery disk.

They advice to do this in case of a master boot record corruption or failure. I just wanted to know, does one only use the recovery CD  for decryption when the is a boot failure, or is there another way the recovery CD can be used for decyption.

As long as you have your BIOS set to boot to a CD (when a bootable CD is in the drive) before using the hard disk, you can use the CD for booting to it and decrypting your disk.  However, you should do this only if you cannot use PGP Desktop from within Windows for the decryption.  The CD has only 16 bit processing and is slow; it can take days to decrypt and you must not stop the decryption once it is started.

In some cases, simply booting using the recovery CD can correct what ever the problem was. In other cases it will allow you to get logged into winodws. If you can get that far, it will be much faster to decrypt from within the operating system.

If the recovery CD is unable to get you logged into windows but it does accept your passphrase, I would suggest attaching the drive to another computer (using an external drive enclosure). If pgp is installed on the other computer, you can then use some of the steps/options in the knowledge base.

(As far as decrypting using the recovery CD, one customer reported it took 8 days.)