Repairing PGP WDE Local Self Recovery

Products

• Symantec Products

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information on how to print out your current questions/answers, remove empty Local Self Recovery (LSR) answers, how to recreate the LSR questions and answers, and how to verify that the questions and answers are correct.

 

Resolution

Note: Versions of PGP Desktop prior to 10.1 allowed empty answers to be configured. This allowed users to enter empty answers at the PGP BootGuard screen, and the system would proceed to boot into the operating system. Starting with PGP Desktop 10.1, empty answers are no longer allowed. To recover from this, follow all of the procedures in this article.

 To retrieve your Local Self Recovery questions

1. Open a command line prompt and navigate to the PGP Desktop installation directory (usually, C:\Program Files\PGP Corporation\PGP Desktop).
2. Type the following command at the prompt:

pgpwde disk 0 -u [user] --recovery-questions (where [user] is the user's name on the encrypted disk)

3. Copy the contents of the output and save it in a text or other file. You will need this information if you want to use the same questions when you recreate the LSR questions.

To delete your current Local Self Recovery questions and answers

1. At the command prompt used in the previous procedure, type the following:

pgpwde --disk 0 -p [passphrase] -u [user] --recovery-remove (where [passphrase] is the passphrase used to access the disk and [user] is the user's name associated with that passphrase)

To create or recreate your Local Self Recovery questions and answers

1. In PGP Desktop, navigate to the PGP Disk section, select your disk, select the user, and click Add Security Questions.
2. Create and answer the five security questions. To use your existing questions, refer to the file saved in the first procedure. The user's name is displayed with LSR to the right (and a tool tip), to indicate that "local self recovery" has been configured for the user.