Compatibility of Acronis Backup Software with PGP Software

Decrypt the partition before backing up or back it up from Acronis Bootable Media

This article applies to:

When backing up a partition or hard disk encrypted with PGP software, the Acronis product shows numerous error messages:

Failed to read data from disk
Restoring a backup that was taken from a PGP encrypted machine will lead to the following error:
loading stage2
PGPWDE disk data are corrupted. Please use PGP recovery disk.
Cannot continue. Press any key to halt the system...

Acronis backup software and PGP intefer with each other.

There are two workarounds for the described issue:

When taking a backup, make sure that you exclude the file PGPWDE01. This file is used as a loopback device by PGP, and Acronis software cannot back it up. This exclusion will not affect the restore capabilities;
After the restore, the original PGP boot loader will be restored as well. This loader will treat that the restored system as encrypted, while it is actually not. To resolve it, you will need to rebuild the MBR as described is Restoring Windows Boot Loader Manually.

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