I have had trouble using Norton Ghost to back up and restore systems encrypted with WDE. PGP tech support had little experience using Ghost with WDE and was not even aware of another BU propgram, Casper Secure Drive Backup, specifically designed to work with PGP WDE. Have had trouble with Casper, too (will call their tech support about that).
At this moment I am trying to use Ghost 14 to BU drives encrypted with WDE 10.1.0. I recently contacted PGP tech support when my attempt to restore a Ghost BU created on a new computer before PGP had been installed failed: the PGP WDE boot screen appeared after I restored the Ghost BU. The tech referred me to a PGP knowledge base article which advised that one must disable SmartSector copying in Ghost in order to use with PGP WDE. However, since I disabled SmartSector copying, I am unable to back up partitions encrypted by WDE. When I attempt to BU C:, it fails:
"Error E7C3000F: Device \\?\Symantec Snapshot cannot read 7341 sectors starting at LBA 81924096."
When I tried to back up another partition, I got a similar error with different number of sectors and different LBA (don't known what LBA is...I am not an IT person, just an individual running a one-person business without tech support experts). But when I enabled SmartSector copying, the backups succeeded. Furthermore, I just found a Forum post at http://forum.pgp.com/t5/PGP-Whole-Disk-Encryption-for/Upgraded-a-WDE-Windows-XP-Drive-using-Norton-Ghost-12/td-p/15651 which documents that the poster successfully restored a Ghost BU created without disabling SmartSector copying, and that the trick to getting rid of the PGP WDE boot screen that persists after restoring what in his case was an unencrypted BU (apparently made from within Windows) was to use the Ghost recovery disk to restore the MBR—which the PGP tech I talked to did not know about.
At this point my questions are:
(1) Is it necessary or not to disable SmartSector copying when backing up partitions or an entire system encrypted with WDE?
(2) Do these error messages mean there is something wrong with these partitions? I have already run chkdsk /r on both, and I still get these error messages. How can I fix them? Should I back up the partitions by cloning (either with Ghost or Casper) to an external drive, reformat the partitions, and then clone from my backups back to the original hard disk in my laptop?
(3) Does anyone know how Ghost 15 cold backups (i.e., backups created in the recovery disk environment, rather than from within Windows) work with PGP WDE? The knowledge base article was written before Ghost had this feature, so it does not address it. Do you need to disable SmartSector copying? Do you need to check "restore MBR" when restoring such a backup?
I am running Win XP SP3.
Am posting on both PGP and Norton forums, hoping to find someone familiar with using both together.