The Firmware Page

A bit of a vexing issue here.

I have a macbook pro 6,1, dual core 2.6 ghz, it was running 10.6.8 and bootcamp with windows 7.

The DVD drive is HL-DT-ST DVDRW GS23N SB07

I decided to flash the DVD drive with this firmware package:

http://files.rpc1.org/index.php?act=view&id=5778

The internal SSD drive was encrypted with PGP whole disk encryption.

Anyway I booted into windows and downloaded that firmware package. It's an executible so I ran it. It reported that it detected my drive, recognized that it was already on an existing firmware called SB07, and offered to flash it. I flashed it, that worked fine. Everything was still working fine. Then I rebooted.

I got past the PGP password page, and the mac gave the icon (circle with line through it) that means there's no bootable volume found. When I tried to boot into windows, the PGP password entry page shows, it verifies my password correctly, and then says "missing operating system".

Now how flashing a DVD drive would nuke the startup volume, I don't know, but I cannot think of anything else I could have done that would cause this problem. Is the firmware update file a trojan or something? Doubt it, others would have noticed.

I decrypted the drive by booting from the PGP utility disk for this purpose (DVD drive works fine).

It still shows windows & mac volumes. Can't boot into either, same behavior as described above.

Disk utility reports that there are problems with each volume, but it cant repair them.

Booting from drivegenius 3 dvd, it doesn't even recognize any attached drives to work with. Disk utility got further than that.

Booting into target disk mode, I ran disk warrior on another mac and tried to access the volumes to try to repair at least the mac volume. It doesn't detect anything over firewire.

Im at a bit of a loss here. I was prepared for the DVD drive to get nuked, sure, but scarcely did I imagine my entire main bootup hard drive would be lost.

Any ideas? Thanks,

the file is not a trojan and is good. It would of only flashed the targeted drive, that being the LG. It would not of touched any internal HDD. How long have you had the encryption on, and by who, symantec?

BTW I see that I am supposed to patch the firmware with a utility before flashing. So, I didn't do that step. Just flashed the original firmware again, I suppose.

Other things I did - I reset the SMC (system management controller) by holding shift-ctrl-option-power button. I am going to make a boot disk with diskwarrior on it.

Im sure its not a trojan, I was just brainstorming. The notebook has been encrypted since I got it, about a year ago. It's running PGP WDE so now, now it is by symantec, who bought PGP a while ago. The PGP version was 10.2 MP3. I suppose it's possible that something else caused the problem and it's just a coincidence that the last thing I did was flash the DVD firmware then reboot. But I think that's unlikely. I havent done anything risky or fishy.

have a feeling bootcamp is the issue here, i'm sure the two don't exactly get along. Is bootcamp installed purely to flash this drive, and was not present before, or have you always had in installed with the encrypted drive?

It's always had the bootcamp partition, I didn't install it just to flash.

My instinct is that there must be something really odd going on with bootcamp and with the PGP WDE and the firmware flasher, but it really escapes me what it could be.

Anyway my next idea is to try datarescue and just see if it can find and scan the hard drive for files and recover those. Then I can reformat hard drive and reinstall, at least getting back some files.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/ ... gp-wde-mac

could try having a read on symantec's forum.

snikkersworth, nothing to do with your disk encryption problem, but why aren't you using the latest available firmware (SB11) instead of the older SB07?

You can use MCSE to do the patching (Auto RPC2 and/or Increase Read Speed depending on what you want).