McAfee End Point Encryption / SafeBoot MBR
Milty
End Point Encryption installed and functional. It is a company
laptop, and I want to be able to clone to an exact matching sata
drive, and be able to boot from it/use it if/when necessary.
So far, I have only tried Acronis True Image Home 9 and afterwards,
the 'cloned' hard drive just boots up with a "SafeBoot has been
corrupted (Error 92H)" error.
The admins of the McAfee SafeBoot system say that they would first
have to decrypt the drive / remove SafeBoot.
Anyone ran into this and had any success with it ?
DES
Not directly... But you didn't mention what OS? I'll assume XP?
First, a lot of software, especially security stuff uses the VolumeID
(Disk Signature) as a form of copy protection. In fact XP keys the
installation to the VolumeID (as seen in HKLM\System\MountedDevices\).
It's good to duplicate the VolumeID to the destination disk (although
I'd think the Imaging should have done this)? Second, if Windows has
seen the cloned to volume and assigned it a Drive Letter, which the
act of cloning would imply, then for the destination volume to boot it
must think it's the installed to volume. This is accomplished in
xxclone by "making the destination bootable", which swaps the drive
letter and volume label assignments between the source & destination
in the registry of the destination.
I had some outstanding success recently replacing both a failing OS
Disk and it's clone in one major overhaul by copying both volumes to
new disks with CloneZilla. An Open Source app that could care less
what's on the disk, file system, 32-64 bit, whatever, it just
duplicates it. After replacing both disks in one case opening, the
computer it's self didn't even know the operation had occurred, other
than no more failing disk start-up problems, and working much better.
It does do a partition copy, so in this case the larger disks had
unallocated space on the ends which required Resizing after the fact
(about a 2 second job for the Paragon Had Disk Manager 8.5 Pro). Old
120 GB Maxtor IDE-133, 2 MB cache units replaced by 160 GB Western
Digital IDE-100, 8 MB cache units. And the larger cache more than made
up for any IDE rate loss.
For Windows 7 (and Vista too I'm sure) this is an entirely different
ball game. Here the system assigns Unique Global Identifiers to each
disk in the Hidden\System\ file "boot" (the boot store). The only way
I've been able to get this done so far is to actually let Windows do
it. Either a Windows Installation Disk or a Windows 7 Repair Disk
(which Windows 7 can burn it's self) can scan the disk for the Windows
Installation and "Repair" the boot sequence. This leaves a unique C:
\Boot\boot file on that disk. This file (entire directory even better)
must be Excluded from update on further clone maintenance. A copy of
the original boot file will not boot a clone (another disk). I don't
know where the GUID comes from on a disk (yet)... but Windows 7 sure
does!
DES