File Share Encryption

Here is the story: 

I have a laptop with a HDD encrypted by Symantec whole disk encryption. I knew that I shouldn't try messing with it with dual boot etc, so I bought an mSATA SSD and installed Windows 7 Professional 64 bit on that. It works perfectly. However, when I tell the boot options to boot from the HDD instead of the SSD, it still boots from the SSD. And when I remove the SSD, the computer naturally tries to boot from the HDD and I receive the error:  

Windows failed to start. 

The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible 0xc000000e

My theory is that the MBR on the HDD has been overwritten and looks for the SSD. And as a result, I cannot boot to my HDD anymore. Is there a way I can re-write the Symantec MBR without decrypting my entire HDD? 

Hi Androng,

If you don't have a backup as a first approach I would SLAVE the encrypted drive to another machine with PGP, authenticate and try to copy over the data.

As you wrote MBR must have been overwritten with Standard windows 7 professional MBR hence you can't boot.

If you did not backup a PGP MBR I am afraid there is no option to recover/rewrite PGP MBR/bootguard.

Before trying anything further, I would make absolutely certain that the system isn't simply checking for the removed drive.  If necessary, you may want to disable all other devices in the boot menu in the BIOS, and manually select the appropriate drive on boot.

If you slave the drive to another machine that has Symantec Encryption Desktop installed, it will prompt you to authenticate to the drive if it recognizes the file system.  If it doesn't, it may indeed have been damaged or overwritten somehow.  If you are unable to authenticate to and access the drive you should still be able to try restoring the PGP Bootguard by running the following commands:
pgpwde --enum
That should show you which disk number you will need to enter for the next command.
pgpwde --recover --disk X --passphrase YourPassphrase
That should run a check of the entire disk, sector by sector, to see if it can find a backup PGP Bootguard record.  If successful, it should restore the Bootguard.  The main disadvantage here is that it will need to see the damaged Bootguard as well as the backup, so if the entire Bootguard was removed, it may not work.  In many cases there will still be remnants that the system can read.

The --recover command is a slow process, as it has to check every sector of the drive.  Be sure the system is on outlet power, not battery.