Endpoint Encryption

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  • 1.  PGP virtual disk fails to mount, no users listed

    Posted Mar 04, 2012 04:47 PM

    I'm having a PGP virtual disk secured with only one passphrase (no key users). It was created in 2006 with the PGP version current then and has worked as expected until today, when after booting up it no longer accepts the passphrase or shows any users in the PGP Desktop “User Access” pane. Because PGP can no longer find any users or passphrases associated with the PGD file, all administrative functions fail also (adding users with “there was a problem creating this user” and re-encrypt from the WE context menu with “The admin user's private key is not present on this machine. You will not be able to perform any operations that require administrator password.”). PGP Desktop will show the other disk details such as size and encryption algorithm (AES256).

    Is this virtual disk lost forever, or are there any troubleshooting or recovery steps? Backups for this virtual disk are monthly and offsite.

    The box is fully patched WinXP SP3 and PGP Desktop build 2526. Other PGP virtual disks still work, including CAST ones dated 2003 and ones created more recently with PGP Desktop 10.1 and 10.2.



  • 2.  RE: PGP virtual disk fails to mount, no users listed

    Posted Mar 04, 2012 06:13 PM

    It sounds like a file corruption, possibly due to a bad disk sector.  I'm not real optimistic but would suggest a disk scan for errors; if you have it, something lower level like SpinRite would be more likely to help than the Windows disk scanning.



  • 3.  RE: PGP virtual disk fails to mount, no users listed

    Posted Mar 04, 2012 07:06 PM

    Thanks for the suggestion, but the PGD file resides on a RAID 1 array partition with no logged SMART faults. Also, other virtual drive PGD files are in the same partition and still functioning. If it's a hard fault, there is probably nothing that can be done, short of sending both physical drive units from the array to a data recovery specialist.

    Are there any diagnostic tools to validate the shape of the file, whether it still contains properly structured encrypted data? What PGP Desktop UI tells about the problem is not very informative.  It doesn't seem at all likely, that the entire 10GB volume is somehow damaged, as only a small part of it was written in the last session it was working. With the passphrase, theoretically it should be possible to recover anything not directly damaged or encrypted with a corrupted key etc.

    Or am I incorrect in my understanding, that the actual AES 256 bit key is NOT written in the PGD file itself (which is the case with emails, where the data encryption/decryption symmetric key is written in the email, but encrypted itself with the PKC system key) and cannot be lost by any damage to the PGD file?

    I did find a somewhat related report, but there were no replies and it was filed with WDE, which is not involved nor it was in that case.