PGPDisk-Problem

[Guest_imported]

hi there,

recently I used Partition Magic to repartition my HD (NTFS under Win 2k),
and - of course, Murphy is omnipresent - it crashed. Fortunately I was
able to recover all of my files - all except one. And, guess what -
that one file was my PGPDisk-Image-File. My recovery-tool marked it
as 'cross-linked', so I think, most of it is still valid, but the
end of the file is corrupted.

As a result, PGPDisk won't accept my passphrase anymore ("Wrong
passphrase&quot and refuses to decrypt the image. As far as i'm
concerned, the passphrase is attached to the end of the file. If
this is true, there must be a way to decrypt the image by
decrypting the data without checking the entered passphrase
agains the one stored at the end of the file. Is there any patch
available to stop PGPDisk doing this check?

Is there any other way to decrypt the image - maybe be a third party
program or any other PGP-tool? Or is it possible to 'repair' the
stored passphrase or to copy the data to a newly created empty diskimage
with the same passphrase and size? Or is there a description of the file
format of PGP-diskimages available?

Does anybody have a clue?

Many thanks in advance!

Holger

 

[Guest_imported]

Dude,
Had a similar problem recently - found a solution. One of my PGP disks was detected as being crosslinked by scandisk. When I 'repaired' the problem and rebooted, PGP disk told me that the PGP file did not appear to be a valid PGP disk, it didn't even ask me to enter a password. I figured that scandisk had added a bunch of bytes to the end of the file when 'undoing' the crosslinking (the PGP file size was larger than I remembered.

Solution: Using ultraedit (

http://www.ultraedit.com),

I loaded the PGP file. I searched for the string 'PGPdMAIN' (case sensitive). It should appear twice in the file, once at the beginning, once towards the end. If you don't find a second instance then your file was probably truncated :-(. I counted down 31 lines (in default display mode) after the occurance of the second PGPdMAIN marked and then selected and cut all remaining bytes from the file. I then resaved the file and bingo, it I could access it again. Note that I chose 31 lines because I found that another PGP file I have with the same passphrase ended after this number of lines, basically I just compared like with like and truncated my damaged file so that I 'looked like' a valid file. There were also a string of zero values toward the end of the file - the rubbish that SCANDISK added started with non-zero values.

Easy as that (I say in hindsight).
Ivan.