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Defraggler can unrecoverably damage Safeguard encrypted drive - your experience?

mvar

Hello all,

 could anyone prove or deny this risk?

DO NOT RUN these steps, just share your feedback, if this rings any bells

1. Use Piriform Defraggler disk defragmenter tool on Win7 PRO, NTFS, Sophos 5.60.0.192 - (standard defragmentation completes fine).

2. In drive map, find $MFT system file and select Defragment - it is done successfully and this is safe on systems without Sophos.

3. Now, any running application touching HDD hangs and entire Windows hangs soon, too.

4. After restart, no OS is found by Sophos boot loader.

5. After subsequent restart, Sophos boot loader shows its screen but cannot proceed to OS load point.

6. Now, drive content is not recoverable even by administrators.

ON THE OTHER HAND:

(1) After reimaging of unrecoverable drive with blank system, my drive has shown some physical errors.

(2) http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/109359.html says Sophos supports ALL defragmenters.

(3) Defragmenting $MFT is necessary when it is scattered into many pieces across drive, preventing large files to be stored in single piece.

:19645


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  • 0

    Hi Mvar,

    welcome to the forum and thank you very much for posting.

    With regards to your post I'd like to provide some information:

    1. The KBA that you mentioned targets SafeGuard Disk Encryption 4.x which is using a DIFFERENT technology than SafeGuard Enterprise.

    2. Defragmentation of a drive is generally possible but w/o changing the disk and file system setup massively. Especially the $MFT must not be changed on an encrypted system.

    3. After re-imaging the drive (or did you re-install=?) it can happen that the drive will still show some bad files but this would be left over from previous installations as SafeGuard Enterprise uses bad sectors to allocate its kernel area.

    Regards

    Dan

    :19869
Reply
  • 0

    Hi Mvar,

    welcome to the forum and thank you very much for posting.

    With regards to your post I'd like to provide some information:

    1. The KBA that you mentioned targets SafeGuard Disk Encryption 4.x which is using a DIFFERENT technology than SafeGuard Enterprise.

    2. Defragmentation of a drive is generally possible but w/o changing the disk and file system setup massively. Especially the $MFT must not be changed on an encrypted system.

    3. After re-imaging the drive (or did you re-install=?) it can happen that the drive will still show some bad files but this would be left over from previous installations as SafeGuard Enterprise uses bad sectors to allocate its kernel area.

    Regards

    Dan

    :19869
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