Please help.....I am running PGP 10.3.2 MP8 on Windows 7. I was stuck in a startup repair reboot loop and foolishly ran bootrec /fixmbr, thereby wiping out my PGP MBR and making a bad problem worse. After that, the result upon booting was a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left corner.
I pulled out my HDD and put in another HDD where I installed Win7 and PGP from scratch so that I could use pgpwde as I read it will be faster than running from recovery CD. Question - do I have to encrypt the local drive to properly use pgpwde, or can I leave it decrypted? I want to leave it decrypted as I am worried new keys will be generated and sent to my employer's server where they will wipe out the old ones for the original drive. I don't really understand how the keys work but want to avoid clobbering anything remotely stored under my SSO company ID.
First thing I did my my MBR damaged HDD was attempt to clone it using Clonezilla since I didn't want to do anything that may destroy it further. That failed initially due to bad sectors. Then I ran Clonezilla with --rescue parm, skipping bad sectors, and it succeeded. Subsequently, I read that DDRescue would have been a better choice as it will recover more data. So, using yet another different drive, I ran DDRescue and got what seems like good results to me - 131K total error size and 16 errors. I have the hex map of exactly where the errors are on the drive and their sizes. Note that I am using 2TB external Seagate drives as the targets when doing this cloning - my originally drive is a 500GB SATA 6.0 2.5" with about 248GB used.
I played with pgpwde on the Clonezilla clone with the skipped sectors while waiting for the DDRescue to complete. The good news is that pgpwde --recovery was successful. It said it found the backup BGFS record on sector 3. Then it reported "Recovery successful". However, I tried booting off the cloned drive, and it said BootGuard loading stage 2... in the top left corner and hung. I am looking at this tech article - https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH149631.html Should I have run PGP's --fixmbr before the --recover? I ran pgpwde --status, and it showed the disk as offline and uninstrumented. Shouldn't it have been online and instrumented after successsful recovery?
In any case, I have abandoned the Clonezilla drive for DDRescue - I am making a copy of the DDRescue clone right now so that I don't destroy that one and will try the "pgpwde --recovery" on it when it's done. But can you please tell me if I should run "pgpwde --fixmbr" first?
And, of course, I would appreciate any other advice you have.
Thank you!!