A BIOS flash rendered my encrypted drive useless. How do I get my data?
I have a HP dc5700S desktop machine with WinXPPsp2 running GuardianEdge Encryption Anywhere on bootup. I did a BIOS flash from within Windows (the HPQFlash thing). I'm certain that the version and method was correct, except after the reboot my drive wouldn't boot. I tried many other flashes from a bootable usb stick (there's actually 2 things to flash: a microcode and the BIOS so I tried many versions of each). All flashes seem successful, and BIOS is available, yet no boot. Just a black screen after a few HDD flashes.
I moved the drive into another similar machine and (while booted into this machine's working C drive) I see that my encrypted drive from the dc5700s is unreadable and asks me to format it. I deduce that my original BIOS flash within Windows has overwritten my MBR or something which makes my encrypted drive unreadable. I have no reason at all to believe that my hardware is actually faulty. Note also that I can see the HP recovery partition from the drive, so only the C drive is unreadable.
So the obvious question, assuming my deduction is correct, is how do I get back at my data on the encrypted drive. We install Encryption Anywhere via group policy so there's no CD or anything in my office and some quick googling hasn't given me anything. Can anyone help me? I'm going home and will check your suggestions in 12 hours when I return. Thanks in advance.
I moved the drive into another similar machine and (while booted into this machine's working C drive) I see that my encrypted drive from the dc5700s is unreadable and asks me to format it. I deduce that my original BIOS flash within Windows has overwritten my MBR or something which makes my encrypted drive unreadable. I have no reason at all to believe that my hardware is actually faulty. Note also that I can see the HP recovery partition from the drive, so only the C drive is unreadable.
So the obvious question, assuming my deduction is correct, is how do I get back at my data on the encrypted drive. We install Encryption Anywhere via group policy so there's no CD or anything in my office and some quick googling hasn't given me anything. Can anyone help me? I'm going home and will check your suggestions in 12 hours when I return. Thanks in advance.
By temporarily installing another hard drive (or booting from a USB drive), are you able to re-flash the BIOS back to the version previously installed on the machine, and then re-install your encrypted drive and boot from it? I have, honestly, NO idea if this will work (in fact, some BIOS updaters will not let you "update" to an older BIOS than the currently-installed one)....but it might be worth a try.
ASKER
Thank you but nah that won't do it. It's not the version of BIOS that's my problem, it's the fact that my first flash would have used part of the boot partition to store it's info (and therefore wrote over some of the encryption stuff). Besides I already tried all versions of the BIOS and microcode available, before I'd realised that this was what had happened.
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As said, contact support of the software.
At least they can give you help with the 1st steps with THEIR software to recover YOUR data.
At least they can give you help with the 1st steps with THEIR software to recover YOUR data.
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http://www.guardianedge.com/support/