So, on my work laptop I am using PGP to perform whole disk encryption.  It’s a Macbook Pro,  and being a mobile machine we needed to encrypt it’s drive.

For some reason my Macbook Pro locked up during the encryption process (I can say positively that it’s an unrelated issue – the encryption itself is not the cause of the lockup, it was happening before encryption was introduced and Ive yet to identify the cause).

Upon reboot I was able to get into the drive, but PGP was locked up on encrypting the drive and wouldn’t proceed forward.   Likewise the gui gave me no option for stopping the encryption, or decrypting.  It seemed at first glance as though my drive was borked in an eternal state of half-encrypted.

Thankfully, first glance was incorrect.

PGP’s WDE engine recognized that there had been a poweroff, and because of that the disk was in an unknown state and PGP was not proceeding forward.

The fix was fairly straightforward.   From a command line I issued the following commands:

pgpwde –enum    (this will tell you the disk number)

pgpwde –disk 0 –stop –passphrase <passphrase>  (this stops the current encryption)

At this point I logged out and logged back in to complete the process.

When I logged back in, PGP still looked like it was stuck.   Issuing the following commands rectified that:

pgpwde –disk0 –decrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

pgpwde –disk0 –stop

pgpwde –disk0 –encrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

The first tells pgp to start decrypting the drive, which throws it immediately into a known state.   The second stops the decryption, and the third restarts the encryption – at a known state – and will resume at or around the same place where it had been stuck before.

Passphrase needs to be the passphrase you set up when you initiated encryption in the first place.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Related Posts

• No Related Posts