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Rapid Recovery
How to use Vista D-Cryptor Software
WARNING
The Vista D-Cryptor application makes changes to a target disk in order to repair it. It is recommended that a clone/image of the disk be used. Bad disks will cause instability when trying to recover data and in most cases will not work anyway.
When to use Vista D-Cryptor
FDR BitLocker Edition can be used when damage or corruption has occurred to partitions and boot information. Although this information makes up a small part of a working disk; our experience in data recovery shows that this type of logical problem is one of the most common reasons for data loss.
Data corruption can be the result of user error or operating system errors.
Damage to a disk can be due to bad sectors which cannot be read and so all information is lost. Quite often a disk with bad sectors will need to be cloned in order to perform any data recovery procedures. This image of the bad disk will often contain empty sectors where the original disk cannot be read.
If a disk has severe corruption and/or physical problems then it is advised to seek the advice of a data recovery professional.
Identifying Problems with a Disk in Windows
If a disk appears as “Not Initialised” in the Windows Disk Management Console then the Master Boot Record is either missing completely or damaged to such an extent that Windows cannot use the Primary Partition Table contained within. In this case, you will need to follow the section entitled “Repairing Lost Master Boot Records (Sector 0)”.
If a disk has incomplete or incorrect partition information then you can simply scan for lost partitions and recreate them in an empty Primary Partition slot. If this is the case then it is still worthwhile reading through the above mentioned section and backing up the damaged Master Boot Record and making sure one or more Primary Partition slots are empty and available.
Once a disk has a working Master Boot Record with an available Primary Partition slot, follow the section entitled “Finding Lost Partitions and Restoring”. Once repaired and available, a partition can be unlocked, mounted and decrypted by following the section entitled “Unlocking a Repaired BitLocker Encrypted Partition”.
Installing Fields Disk Rescue – BitLocker Edition
Check that your system meets the system specifications required. Then run the setup executable file and follow on-screen instructions.
FDR BitLocker Edition was developed using the Microsoft .NET framework; therefore any prerequisites will be automatically downloaded through your Internet connection and installed automatically.
If you experience any problems during installation, please see the “Fields Disk Rescue Support and Bug Reporting” section.
Using Fields Disk Rescue – BitLocker Edition
Repairing Lost Master Boot Records (Sector 0)
In the instance of corrupt or missing Master Boot Records, Windows will not be able to find and mount primary partitions or will mount them incorrectly. However, FDR BitLocker Edition can scan disks for missing partitions and it is possible to rebuild the Master Boot Record.
Where the Master Boot Record (MBR) is missing entirely, whether due to bad sectors or an incomplete image, the MBR from another working disk can be used and partition information changed based on scan results:
- By right-clicking on a disk in the FDR BitLocker window, it is possible to load and save the
MBR. Backup the MBR, if it exists, from the target disk by saving it.
Figure 1 - Save the MBR from a working system. The disk you are running Windows Vista from should be fine.
- Load the working MBR onto the target disk.
- Once loaded, right-click on the first listed record for the damaged disk and select “Edit MBR”. Set the partition type to “Empty/Unused” and set the Start and Size values to zero. Do the same for any other records on the target disk that are used.
- Save the MBR from a working system. The disk you are running Windows Vista from should be fine.
- Load the working MBR onto the target disk.
- Once loaded, right-click on the first listed record for the damaged disk and select
“Edit MBR”. Set the partition type to “Empty/Unused” and set the Start and Size values to zero.
Do the same for any other records on the target disk that are used.
Figure 2
Finding Lost Partitions and Restoring
You can scan a disk for lost partitions and recreate Primary Partition records so that they can once again be accessed and, if necessary, decrypted:
- Right-clicking on the target disk provides a Scan option. Run a scan to detect all NTFS and
BitLocker Encrypted NTFS partitions.
Figure 3 - Once the scan is completed (or interrupted), any found partitions will be listed. NOTE: Not all of these partitions will necessarily be correct or have been active before the disk failure.
- By right-clicking on a found partition and selecting “Create in MBR”, the partition
information will be automatically added to the next available slot in the Master Boot record.
Figure 4 - Once all necessary partition information has been put into the MBR, you can rescan all disks and partitions by restarting the computer, selecting ‘Rescan’ in the Disk Management utility or using the ‘Rescan’ command in DiskPart.
Unlocking a Repaired BitLocker Encrypted Partition
Once the Master Boot Record is repaired successfully you can use the FDR BitLocker Edition application to unlock and then decrypt them:
- Look for the encrypted volume in the Encryptable Volumes list. It will be marked red as it is locked.
- Right-click on the locked partition and select Unlock from the pop-up menu.
Figure 5 - Enter the recovery key for the locked partition. This key is 48 digits long and is hyphen separated.
- Once unlocked, the partition can be mounted in Windows by rescanning using the Disk Management Console or using the rescan command in DiskPart.
- In some cases, due to corruption, a partition may not work fully once mounted in Windows. You can also encrypt/decrypt any volume once unlocked to allow other tools achieve a more complete recovery.
