ruined pointsec encrypted drive vista installation

Ok, this was my own fault. I should have known. I have a Dell Latitude D620 laptop. It had a standard configuration from Dell with Windows XP sp2 on one ~100GB partition on the drive. I think there was a diagnostic partition which was the first partition and then what Windows sees as a C: drive partition on the rest. It was encrypted with Pointsec whole drive encryption with boot level authentication. I attached a secondary USB drive that I got with the computer, booted off the Vista Beta 2 CD, and installed Vista to the secondary hard drive. It seems that it destroyed my bootloader and my drive with it on the main drive. Pointsec actually comes with the ability to create a recovery disk, but guess what? That didn't work. If you install any version of Windows, it will overwrite your bootloader on your first drive even if it can't access the file system. Please be aware of this. If anyone has an idea of how to fix my problem, please post.

"rschatz" wrote in message

Ok, this was my own fault. I should have known. I have a Dell Latitude D620 laptop. It had a standard configuration from Dell with Windows XP sp2 on one ~100GB partition on the drive. I think there was a diagnostic partition which was the first partition and then what Windows sees as a C: drive partition on the rest. It was encrypted with Pointsec whole drive encryption with boot level authentication. I attached a secondary USB drive that I got with the computer, booted off the Vista Beta 2 CD, and installed Vista to the secondary hard drive. It seems that it destroyed my bootloader and my drive with it on the main drive. Pointsec actually comes with the ability to create a recovery disk, but guess what? That didn't work. If you install any version of Windows, it will overwrite your bootloader on your first drive even if it can't access the file system. Please be aware of this. If anyone has an idea of how to fix my problem, please post.

This has been discussed numerous times already on this forum. Please search. I'd start with VistaBootPro, if I were you. And it's highly unlikely that Vista will boot from an external drive, either.