Q: PGP Installed and Receiving a Blue Screen of Death

PGP is no longer being offered on the software grid. Support is being phased out and will discontinue at the end of 2016.

I'm trying to boot into Windows and am receiving a Blue Screen of Death, even in Safe Mode, and I have PGP Whole Disk Encryption installed, so I can't run any utilities to fix my Windows installation. What do I do?
Note: If you don't feel comfortable following the instructions listed below, contact the IS&T Help Desk.

Answer:

You'll need to create a PGP Recovery CD. Download the recovery CD.

Be Careful Use of the PGP Recovery Disks should be used as the last step when attempting recovery. Should there be a power loss while decrypting with the recovery disk, the result to the disk could be fatal and non-recoverable. Once you have started to decrypt a disk or partition using a recovery disc or diskette, do not stop the decryption process. Depending on the size of the disk being decrypted, this process can take a long time. A faster way to decrypt the drive is to use another system that has the same version of PGP Desktop installed on it.

If experiencing Blue Screen failures at boot up:

1. Boot with PGP Recovery Disk.
2. Do not continue with the normal sequence of entering a passphrase.
3. Go to the advanced panel.
4. The message "PGPWDE record inconsistency on 1 disk(s) was found and fixed" might be displayed. If this message is seen, the BSOD will be fixed.
5. Return back to the previous screen and continue to boot from recovery CD. Rebooting without the Recovery Disk in the drive is also okay.

Use the Recovery Disk with the following instructions should the system not boot into Windows for any other reasons:

Booting from the recovery disk will give the option to either decrypt the PGP Whole Disk or to continue loading Windows, provided the necessary information (one of the session keys used to encrypt the drive) can be found.

1. Enter a passphrase when prompted, and hit any key to continue booting Windows.
2. If this is not possible, reboot the machine, enter the passphrase when prompted and select D to decrypt the drive. The Decryption process, when executed from the Recovery disk, takes considerably longer than it does from within Windows.
3. Once decrypted, you can now use a Windows Recovery CD.

Additional Information More information on PGP can be found on the PGP Desktop page. If you don't find your answer, contact pgp-help@mit.edu.