Guest User!

You are not Sophos Staff.

Thread Info
  • State Not Answered
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 27 replies
  • Subscribers 5 subscribers
  • Views 26279 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Suggested
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

SG Enterprise encryption - Bad Sectors survey

jb1111

Has anyone here encountered bad sectors on encrypted machines?  I had 2 computers run for 3-4 months, get bad sectors and start crashing or going to a Windows screen with no icons <-you can only power off at this point.  Attempting to fix the bad sectors does not help.  The only thing I've gotten to work is backup the files (assuming I can even get into the system) and destroy the hard disk with Dban or killdisk.  These low level format and, "Zero out" the drive.  Once this 6 hour process is done, I reload Windows.  Chkdsk no longer shows bad sectors and life is good.

Has anyone come up with another approach to bad sectors or other hard drive issues?  I am most concerned this will be a monthly occurance.  Perhaps I could get a utility to report when drives start getting bad sectors?

Thanks.

PS - my SG policy is set to, "Proceed on bad sectors = yes"

:4085


This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents
  • 0

    Hi Thomas,

    I hear clearly what you're saying but:

        >Also, you could easily mess up the drive with a Windows PE CD with the SGN filter drivers

    Well you can do that anyway even with bad clusters so I don't follow that argument. I think if anyone started to mess at this level they really should be aware of the implications anyway. Even if we talked about non encrypted drives, if I mount a disk in another OS and deleted systems files, I'd expect the native OS to be screwed up. Equally, it might be important that the area needs to be manipulated to correct errors that occur from time to time in your software. Actually the greatest use I would have of the PE boot would simply be the removal of SGN rather than the manipulation of data. I much prefer to decrypt and then get windows to fix itself properly than try to tweak my own fixes, it's much more reliable that way anyway.

      >Please believe me that all your arguments were discussed already years ago before we started coding.

    Technology moves on though Thomas and there are better ways now. You don't need to do anything differently with filers, at the moment you're marking a contiguos area of the disk marking bad and then storing the start-sector away in the boot sector (I'm assuming). Nothing changes there, you create a continuguous system protected area and again store away the start sector. It's exactly the same - no different filters anywhere just a different marker and one that doesn't imply the disk is going bad.

    Pure curiosity, how does MS's Bit Locker (which I haven't tested myself yet) do disk encryption?

    Matt

    :4496
Reply
  • 0

    Hi Thomas,

    I hear clearly what you're saying but:

        >Also, you could easily mess up the drive with a Windows PE CD with the SGN filter drivers

    Well you can do that anyway even with bad clusters so I don't follow that argument. I think if anyone started to mess at this level they really should be aware of the implications anyway. Even if we talked about non encrypted drives, if I mount a disk in another OS and deleted systems files, I'd expect the native OS to be screwed up. Equally, it might be important that the area needs to be manipulated to correct errors that occur from time to time in your software. Actually the greatest use I would have of the PE boot would simply be the removal of SGN rather than the manipulation of data. I much prefer to decrypt and then get windows to fix itself properly than try to tweak my own fixes, it's much more reliable that way anyway.

      >Please believe me that all your arguments were discussed already years ago before we started coding.

    Technology moves on though Thomas and there are better ways now. You don't need to do anything differently with filers, at the moment you're marking a contiguos area of the disk marking bad and then storing the start-sector away in the boot sector (I'm assuming). Nothing changes there, you create a continuguous system protected area and again store away the start sector. It's exactly the same - no different filters anywhere just a different marker and one that doesn't imply the disk is going bad.

    Pure curiosity, how does MS's Bit Locker (which I haven't tested myself yet) do disk encryption?

    Matt

    :4496
Children
No Data
Unfiltered HTML