I needed to remove PGP from a Windows 7 laptop. I unencrypted the 480GB drive without issue and then uninstalled PGP and rebooted – the laptop then blue-screened and has never successfully booted since.
I ran Windows Repair Disk to no effect - told me the partition existed but with 0 MB. Hoping to salvage the data, I pulled the drive and tried to mount it to another Windows laptop via a SATA-to-USB adapter - Windows replied that the drive needed to be formatted before it could be used. I tried the same on an Ubuntu laptop - the error message stated the 120GB drive couldn’t be mounted.
Catch that? The drive I had was 480GBs but it was now reading as only 120GBs. About 3 months ago, I cloned my old 120GB to a new 480GB and then used DISKPART to expand it out – worked perfectly, no issues at all since then either.
So, my working theory is: PGP was installed on a 120GB drive and essentially “seized up” due to some sort of programmatical error when it was uninstalled from the same drive, which was now somehow much larger. This in turn corrupted the partition or MBR somehow.
The data on the drive is of significant importance and (of course) my back-up failed as well, so I would welcome any suggestions. Thank you in advance.