File Share Encryption

Hi,

I have a WDE 10.3 Windows 7 install with a 10GB unencrypted partition containing Ubuntu. While installing Ubuntu I did not set the advanced option leading to the Bootguard MBR being destroyed. In an attempt to begin fixing the issue, and booting back into my encrypted windows install I ran bootrec /fixmbr from a windows repair DVD.

I have acquired a WDE Recovery Disk but this seems to permanently hang on "PGP Recovery Disk is searching the disk for PGPWDE installation, please wait...".

My questions are:

1. Does this search usually take a very long time (this is on a 150GB SSD and has been running for hours)?

2. Is there anyway to restore the MBR with the WDE bootloader, bootguard?

3. Is there anyway to do this without removing the hard drive from my laptop (this is tricky)?

Many thanks in advance,

Sam

You can always get another external drive with an OS on, and boot from that in order to recover the hard drive inside the laptop.

Did the recovery CD eventually find your encrypted data on the disk? If not, another solution is to mount that drive that had the MBR overwritten on to a machine with the same version of PGP Desktop/Symantec Encryption Desktop installed and then run this commadn to search the disk for a backup of the session keys/user records:

this command lists the drives attached to the system

c:\program files\pgp corporation\pgp desktop\pgpwde --enum

find the disk drive with the correct size and information, etc.

then run this:

c:\program files\pgp corporation\pgp desktop\pgpwde ---recover --disk X (replace X with the disk number returned from the pgpwde --enum command) -p "passphrase here"

example:

on disk 1 (secondary drive since it starts at 0)

with a passphrase of password:

c:\program files\pgp corporation\pgp desktop\pgpwde ---recover --disk 1 -p password