When attempting to run Symantec Drive Encryption (formerly known as PGP Whole Disk Encryption) on a disk, you receive the following one of below errors.
PGP Error
This disk does not appear to have a valid volume. PGP Whole Disk can only encrypt disks with at least one valid volume
or
Symantec Error
This disk does not appear to have a valid volume. Symantec Drive Encryption can only encrypt disks with at least one valid volume
When encrypting via pgpwde command line you will receive an error -1200: bad parameters.
Unsupported Disk Type or Partition Type being used on hard disk installed in the system.
This error can occur when attempting to encrypt an unsupported disk type such as RAID disk drive. The following lists detail the supported and unsupported disk types for use with Symantec Drive Encryption.
Supported Disk Types
The Symantec Drive Encryption feature protects the contents of the following types of disks:
Unsupported Disk Types
The following disk types are not supported:
Unsupported Partition Types
All partition Types except 04 (FAT16), 06 (FAT16B), 07 (NTFS), 0B (FAT32) are unsupported by Symantec Encryption Desktop.
Determine if a Disk is Dynamic or using GPT partitions with Windows 7
If it is not readily evident the drives in question may be using GPT or not, using diskpart on Windows 7 can allow an easy view of this.
This will display a listing of each of the drives. The first disk in the list will be labeled "Disk 0". The second disk is "Disk 1" etc. The results will display several columns. Ensure that the drives in question do not have an asterisk (*) symbol under the "Dynamic" or "GPT" columns. If so, these disks are not supported by Symantec Drive Encryption and cannot be encrypted.
Determine Partition Type with Windows 7
Applies To
PGP Desktop 10.2.x
PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.2.x
Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.x
Symantec Drive Encryption 10.3.x