Recovering data from a PGP Encrypted Drive

[scar1]

Hi, I am hoping someone can share some experience with recovering data from a drive which is PGP encrypted.

I have a laptop running windows 7 which is PGP encrypted. Following a general application problem I chose to reboot my machines, on reboot after going past the normal PGP windows password screen it kept booting into the Windows 7 recover screen.

Understanding that I probably have a hw fault on the hard drive or just need to reinstall windows I did some checking on how I can get the data from my drive.

Firstly, I read that I could decrypt the drive using the right version of boot cd, which I was doing however this was taking much longer than expected. Unknowling my machine became detached from a power source and during the night had powered off.

On reboot I have the same issue as before however now before putting in my windows password I select advance and this shows me the drive attached and that it is 63% encrypyed.

I can login as normal and again takes me to the windows 7 recovery screen.

I then tried to attach the drive via USB to another machines with PGP Desktop installed and tried the following commands;

pgpwde --enum
Total number of installed fixed/removable storage
device (excluding floppy and CDROM): 1
Managed disks:
  Disk Group acfcb4d7-1d19-4d81-ae4c-849b7b25316f:
    Disk 0 has 1 online volumes:
      volume C:\ is on partition 1 with offset 2048
Request sent to Enumerate disks was successful

This command seems to not recognise the attached PGP encrypted drive and im not sure if this normal... (I won't go into my logic on this).

My questions is; given the machine seems to recognise and boot from the drive when installed how is the best way I can try and retrieve my data from the drive.

I was also advised by another person that trying to decrypt 320gb Sata drive which is fully encrypted will take around 5 days and because the drive had been thrashed so much by the end the drive is bound to be defective anyway! - Is there any truth in what I have been told or is he talking rubbish?

Any help is appreciated

Thanks

Scar1

[scar1 · Accepted solution]

Ah ok, sometimes its the simple things present the easiest answer.

I still had the HDD password set, once removed and attached to another machine running PGP I was able to access the drive etc...

In short for me the first option would be to also try and attach to another machine before running the bootable CD to Decrypt. Also some warning of usually how long it will take, i.e several days would be nice.

Thanks

scar1