sb2k

If you properly read the above comments you will see that I made no such accusation. Rightly or wrongly, it was suggested that SafeBoot had a tool to recover a screwed up SafeBoot disk - and I was being denied this tool because you were unlikely to make any more money from me. The key selling point to the enterprise version of SafeBoot, is that security is centrally managed (i.e. fully under IT's control). The suggestion that every time a user's password needs to be reset, someone has to phone SafeBoot support to obtain the "code-of-the-day" is simply ludicrous. If SafeBoot ceased to trade, the customer would not be able to obtain the code-of-the-day and would lose their data. Nobody in their right mind would buy a "security product" that puts the company's data at such risk. I seem to recall from a few years ago that there were a lot of accusations that you were decrypting your customers' hard drives (via a backdoor) for various authorities - and charging a hefty fee. In fact, at one point it was claimed that you were making more money from offering this service than you were from selling the product. Given your track-record, I'm surprised anyone's still buying your product.

Are you saying Cheese, that recovery of a corrupt SafeBoot disk depends on whose chequebook was used to buy it? I thought I knew Simon as well, but was a little disappointed with his reply of "sorry, you're fcuked". If you're saying that a solution to this problem exists, but is only available to enterprise customers, then please state this in your reply.

Thanks for the information Tyorty, but unfortunately my problem relates to a different version of SafeBoot. A few years ago, Control Break decided to enter the 'consumer encryption' market and launched a product known as SafeBoot Solo. Priced at around $100, they sold many copies. The program was based on the same source code as the enterprise version, but most of the features you mention, were stripped out of it. About a year after its launch, Control Break pulled-the-plug and stopped selling Solo. Some speculate that Solo was pulled because it was damaging sales of its enterprise product. The official line is that supporting the product became too costly and the whole exercise was just an experiment.

Thanks for the suggestions Cheese. Unfortunately, the IT dept are not going to be of much help here. Safeboot was a private purchase. We also have no agreements with McAfee for support, as we don't appear to use any of their products. The helpdesk have no experience with encryption software as no-one outside of IT has this type of software installed. The person I spoke to at Safeboot was Simon Hunt, their Chief Technology Officer. He told me that without the recovery disk there was nothing I could do. Perhaps I caught him at a bad time and was given the 'easy' answer? As I'm still here, you might conclude that I haven't given up hope yet - despite the official verdict. As I mentioned earlier, I did come across references to this 'SafeTech' recovery application, but without the password required to run it, I am no closer to finding a solution. If you have any suggestions on how I might obtain this password, then please feel free to point me in the right direction. PS - You are correct, $350m. I mixed my $/? signs up and did an unnecessary currency conversion.

I haven't heard anything from ebssales yet, but I did manage to find the email address of one of the developers of SafeBoot from alt.security.scramdisk. He replied quite promptly that without a file called SBCONFIG, I was up a stream without a paddle. This file contains the actual AES key required to decrypt the disk and is protected by the password you enter to logon to SafeBoot. Unfortunately there was a bug with SafeBoot at the time I bought it that caused the file to bloat to over 5MB, making it impossible to write to a 1.44MB floppy disk. When I installed the program and created the recovery disk, I basically created something that was completely useless. Anyway, I think I can discount any useful assistance from SB/McAfee. I ordered a new Seagate drive today, so I can get my main PC back up and running. I also made a couple of experiments on this old Athlon XP PC (which was also running SBS) with some utilities from sysinternals.com. To cut a long story short, I screwed this PC up as well and have spent the last hour reinstalling XP. This is not one of my better weeks. If anything positive came out of these experiments, it is confirmation that the safeboot.fs file is the one that doesn't like being moved. However, even with a copy of SBCONFIG, the recovery program failed to restore the drive to a working state. I haven't given up trying to recover my data yet, but the Wikipedia entry on the MBR refers to it containing machine code - as opposed to a pointer to the next bootstrap file. In which case, I am definitely out of my league and should probably give up now. I still have a bit of hair left, so I'll give it a few more days.

YoKenny, my day-job involves databases and writing interfaces that exchange data with clients and suppliers. My company has allowed me to work-from-home a few days a week, so long as I can show that any data on my PC is secure. Hence the need for Safeboot. I'm sorry, but I have neither the time nor energy to debate the merits of encryption with you right now. Hazelnut, thanks for keeping this discussion on-topic. I also appreciate your suggestion of emailing encryption solutions. I will give that a go and see what develops. I haven't been too diligent in my backups of late (I know ), so I really don't want to fdisk the PC and start again. If I still haven't resolved this a week from now, I think I will have to buy a replacement HDD to reinstall XP onto - and hope that I can recover the disk at a later date. If I find a solution, I will update this thread. If you're reading this months/years from now and I have not replied, then assume the worst - you will need to reformat your drive.

The problem and error code are documented in the following article - https://knowledge.mcafee.com/article/989/61...SAL_Public.html Problem When booting up a client machine with SafeBoot Device Encryption installed, you see the following error indicating that SafeBoot is corrupt: SafeBoot is corrupt, Error 92H Change or Cause This is due to a corruption or relocation of the SafeBoot file system. Their solution involves creating a bootable floppy and running their recovery application 'SafeTech'. However, what the article does not tell you is that you are required to enter a 4-digit password before it will do anything useful. This password is a hash of the current day, so to guess it you would need to enter up to 10,000 possible combinations before midnight - or the code will change to something else. I was hoping to find a less challenging solution. By now, I'm sure you're wondering why I don't just contact Safeboot support for assistance. The problem here is that the line of Safeboot I have installed (i.e. Solo) was discontinued a few years ago. Up until a few months ago, there was a good chance that CBI would have provided some assistance. However, since being acquired by McAfee their support is only reachable via McAfee's general helpdesk - which is pretty impregnable even for support on its current range of products. So-far I have been unable to find anyone in McAfee who has even heard of Safeboot. Hence my desire to work-out what Defraggler did to the disk and attempt to reverse it.

Safeboot is an OTFE program written by CBI. McAfee recently bought them for $750m and claims to have an installed-base of over 5 million users. HP also offers it as an option on its range of laptops. From what I can gather, Safeboot replaces the MBR with its own version. The Safeboot MBR loads the decryption driver which unlocks the drive and allows Windows to start up normally. I am assuming that the modified MBR points to the physical location on the HDD where safeboot.fs is stored. As this file has been moved, the Safeboot MBR does not know where to find it. My theory is that by moving the safeboot.fs file back to its original location, the Safeboot MBR will be able to see it again. However, this relies on - a) It is possible to relocate a file to a specific location on the disk. There is some way to debug the Safeboot MBR to see what address it expects to find the safeboot.fs file located at. Any comments or suggestions on how I go about achieving this would be very welcome. The machine is running Windows XP, and was virus-free a few days ago when last scanned.

Hi I have a small problem. Ran Defraggler last night, now my PC won't boot up. After a couple of hours Googling, I think I've found the cause of the problem. There are a couple of system files which should never be moved (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227350) - > Moving the following files (if present) can cause desktop problems: > > Safeboot.fs > Safeboot.csv > Safeboot.rsv > Bootsec.doc As the error message reads "Safeboot has been corrupted (error 92h)", I presume it relates to the safeboot.fs file referred to above. This message is shown before any attempt to load Windows. Could somebody please tell me if it's possible to move this safeboot.fs file back to its original location?