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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


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    Hi jb1111,

    Do you know if you tried the WinPE route (mentioned in section 5 of the guide you linked to but not described very well in that document)? Basically WinPE is a standalone 'mini' windows environment. Sophos have bolted into this the SGN engine add-on and it should then allow you to boot directly from this (not your HD so pre-POA or any other OS) and then connect to the drive in your machine (slave your drive into WinPE), mount it using the key file data/challenge response etc and then make corrections to the file structure i.e. replace broken files etc without needing to grab all the data off, reinstall etc. In your case, you knew the system files that were broken, so I'm a bit surprised that this relatively quick solution wasn't successful if suggested and am trying to understand why?

    Matt

    :5130
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  • 0

    Hi jb1111,

    Do you know if you tried the WinPE route (mentioned in section 5 of the guide you linked to but not described very well in that document)? Basically WinPE is a standalone 'mini' windows environment. Sophos have bolted into this the SGN engine add-on and it should then allow you to boot directly from this (not your HD so pre-POA or any other OS) and then connect to the drive in your machine (slave your drive into WinPE), mount it using the key file data/challenge response etc and then make corrections to the file structure i.e. replace broken files etc without needing to grab all the data off, reinstall etc. In your case, you knew the system files that were broken, so I'm a bit surprised that this relatively quick solution wasn't successful if suggested and am trying to understand why?

    Matt

    :5130
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