Symantec PGP Encryption

  • 1.  Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Oct 14, 2011 07:24 PM

    My Windows 7 laptop (HP 8460w) with PGP WDE 10.1.2 does not allow me to eject a USB external hard disk. According to windows process explorer, the windows system task seems to keep a few file handles open in the \$Extend\$RmMetadata directory on the disk. In my case, this problem does not appear on other windows 7 or XP systems without PGP WDE. The disk in question appears as a "Local Disk". USB memory sticks that appear as "Removable Disk" do not seem to have this problem when ejected from within windows explorer.

    The event log reports:

                     The application System with process id 4 stopped the removal or ejection for the device USB\VID_0BC2&PID_3200\2GEA0J4A.

                      Device action request for device 'USB\VID_0BC2&PID_3200\2GEA0J4A' was vetoed by 'STORAGE\Volume\{9c6539f3-f36c-11e0-8d1e-402cf41a4009}#0000000000007E00' with veto type 6.

    and sometimes

                      The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR4.

    While this might be related to the drive firmware or drivers, it doesn't seem to happen when these disks are used on other systems.

    Based on other online discussions, I disabled the "Distributed Link Tracking service", which removed some of the open handles, but not all.

    This problems occurs for both a Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 3.0 (USB 3) and a Seagate Free Agent external disk (USB 2). Both drives have updated firmware and drivers.

    While there may be other installed programs causing this problem, a post at answers.microsoft.com hints that this might be a PGP WDE problem.

    There are many posts online about problems ejecting usb drives with windows 7, but could PGP WDE be causing this problem in my case?



  • 2.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Oct 17, 2011 05:23 PM

    Is your USB drive encrypted?

    Can you eject the drive if you close PGP tray, and stop PGP services?

    Any other application is disturbing? Antivirus or something? (you can try ejecting in safe mode)

     



  • 3.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Oct 18, 2011 06:43 PM

    Thaks for your help. Julian_M asked:

    Is your USB drive encrypted?

          - No, it happens with either of my two USB hard drives.

    Can you eject the drive if you close PGP tray, and stop PGP services?

          - No, when shutting down PGP tray and stopping PGP services the problem still occurs in the same way.

    Any other application is disturbing? Antivirus or something? (you can try ejecting in safe mode)

         - After rebooting in safe mode (diagnostic startup with basic devices and services) the USB drive will still not eject. Curiosly, in this case there are no file handles open on the drive, but something (the system task?) still "vetos" the eject.



  • 4.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Dec 02, 2011 01:26 AM

    I'm having this problem too. I'm using Windows 7 64bits. Before PGP WDE installed, it was working fine. My old notebook with Win XP SP3 had the same issue after PGP installed.



  • 5.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Dec 02, 2011 09:55 AM

    Download process hacker.

    Analyce which file / application / library is creating those handles on the external drive.

    So that we can know who is the one to blame, and we can kill him. :D



  • 6.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Dec 02, 2011 04:53 PM

    See "PGP Desktop prevents safe removal of USB key"

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/pgp-desktop-prevents-safe-removal-usb-key-0

    Apparently a problem resolved by 10.2.



  • 7.  RE: Ejecting USB hard drive on windows 7 laptop with WDE 10.1.2

    Posted Dec 05, 2011 12:45 PM

    Yes, I can confirm that this problem was resolved by PGP Desktop 10.2 Build 1678. However, if you are running Windows XP I would recommend holding off on an upgrade to 10.2 becuase we have seen several problems with customers getting BSOD (Blue screen of Death) errors when upgrading to 10.2 on Windows XP.


    This will be resolved very shortly with our Maintenance Pack 3 update. This will be 10.2 MP3 and it will be out probably by next week.