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I have a MacBook Air from late 2012 that is running Mountain Lion. I also have PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.2.1 installed and use it. On Monday night, I suddenly encountered a bad sector and the system completely froze. I hit the power button to restart and now the PGP WDE password screen comes up. After entering my password, I get the Apple logo and a progress bar. Almost immediately after the spinning gear appears under the Apple logo, the system just powers down.

I have used the restore partition to install OS X onto a USB drive (also, this runs really slowly, advice on speeding this up would also be accepted). I have installed a trial version of the latest PGP (now called Symantec Encryption Desktop), and have started the decryption process. It's slow, but it goes. However, after a while OS X tried to mount the drive and gave an error, and now even in Disk Utility, the physical drive does not appear. But if I remove the USB drive, I can still get PGP password screen and get to the Apple logo before it just powers down.

I would like to ask for any advice on how to proceed and recover as much data as possible.

James Howard
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2 Answers2

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I see from your question that you attempted to decrypt, but I am not sure what steps you took to kick off the encryption. I wanted to provide you with some additional recovery information.

If you have not tried already, I suggest to use the 10.2.1 recovery image. I have included a link below for you convenience.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH197687

You will need to use another MAC OS X computer to burn this image to a USB drive. If you have access to a Windows PC you can find a utility online that will allow you to create a bootable USB with the recovery image.

After you have created the bootable media, restart the Air Book booting to the USB Drive. You may need to authenticate to the disk and then you should see an option to decrypt.

Once the drive is decrypted you should be able to boot into the OS, or run repair options provided to you by OS X.

BenjiWiebe
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Raymond Duron
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James,

I wanted to provide you with some additional information. According to our supported OS Guide, Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.5) is not supported with the version of Whole Disk Encryption you installed. Please see the following guide for supported version of OS X and Whole Disk Encryption: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH174563

Sincerely,

Raymond Duron

Raymond Duron
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