PGP Whole Disk Encryption for Macintosh

[#1]

Today I found myself wanting to do a full system restore from an encrypted Time Machine volume.  After an afternoon of research, it looks like the fundamental problems are:

1. No way to load the PGP software and then boot the Leopard DVD to run the restore program.  Without the PGP disk encryption drivers loaded, the Leopard DVD cannot (obviously) read the Time Machine volume.

2. Having booted another OS X volume (on USB or whatever) with PGP installed, so you can see the Time Machine volume, there is no obvious way to run the "Restore System from Backup" utility.  It's not present as an application when you install OS X.

After a little poking around, I've figured out how to solve #2.  The "Restore System from Backup" utility is different from the rest of the utilities on the Leopard DVD: it is not a separate application like Disk Utility or Terminal.  In fact, it is built right into the Installer application itself.  To access it you have to start the Mac OS X installer.

Here's a slightly ugly procedure to restore from an encrypted Time Machine volume.

1. Boot an OS X volume that has PGP installed.  This volume cannot be the target volume when you restore from Time Machine later.

2. Attach your Time Machine volume and type the PGP passphrase so the disk is now readable to the OS.

3. Insert the Leopard DVD.

4. Open the Terminal and run the following command:

sudo "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/CDIS/Mac OS X Installer.app/Contents/MacOS/Mac OS X Installer" "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg"

You may need to replace Mac OS X Install Disc 1 with whatever the name of your Leopard installer DVD is.  Mine came with my MacBook, so it has this name because there are two disks.  sudo is required because the Installer needs root permissions to be be able to set permissions on the target volume when you perform the restoration.

5. The installer will show the usual Leopard installation screen, which you can ignore.  Go to the Utilities menu and select "Restore System from Backup".  Follow instructions as you usually would for a Time Machine restore.

6. Reboot to your restored volume and re-encrypt your boot volume (if that is what you had before).

I'm current trying out this procedure, and I'm on step 5 with 9 hours to go.  Hopefully this helps someone out.  (I imagine one could create a recovery OS installation to do this without the Leopard DVD at all, but this suits my needs for now.)

Update: Success!  The restore process worked great and took 8 hours for 300 GB of data.

Message Edited by seibert on 03-02-2009 06:25 AM