Long time readers, and anyone who has ever Googled “Guardian Edge” recall my intense dissatisfaction with GuardianEdge 8.7 and Vista on my Toshiba Laptop. Everything old is new again.
GuardianEdge released 9.5.1 last month so we finally have support for Hard Disk Encryption with preboot authentication on Windows 7. The short version of the story is I’ll be finding out how good my Windows Backup is. I installed GuardianEdge Hard Disk 9.5.1 on my Toshiba Portege M780 and started encrypting. I shut the computer down, went home and the computer wont boot. When I hit the power button, I can get to the preboot authentication screen. The system fan is going full blast. It doesn’t do that normally. And 5 seconds later the computer turns itself off.
I called support and their advice is to use the GuardianEdge Access utility to recover my data and reinstall. Hope that backup worked. Not what I was planning to do tonight.
What am I supposed to do now. This gives me zero confidence to deploy this to others. While there are plenty of other dominos that need to fall in our Windows 7 project, getting a GE package for Windows 7 is an important one.
The recover /a option was grayed out. No problems were detected with the GEHD volume files. So I decrypted the drive and uninstalled GEHD. I was then able to use the computer. I have a lot of doubt right now about the ability of GEHD to encrypt Vista and Windows 7
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I have worked with GE for several years, and none of those years have I chanced shutting any of out machines down DURING encryption. I realize you are “supposedly” able to do this with GE, but only if you click the ‘STOP’ button before shutting down and it resumes next boot. I don’t think it’s confidence in the product you should be worried about lol…
Somehow I dont see “don’t turn your machine off during initial encryption”going over big with the users. Works ok for new system deployment when the computer is still in the helpdesk.
Besides, I don’t believe that is the cause. Rebooting during encryption is just to find out if the system is hosed or not. So you can recover without waiting hours for a decryption.
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