Recently I was given a new Win XP SP3 laptop with Utimaco’s SafeGuard Enterprise 5.35 installed. Just to briefly mention here that this is a quite popular disk encryption software. I let the it encrypt the laptop’s hard-drives and I did not have any problems restarting it. The next days the machine started fine too, and then it was Sunday when I was home having some spare time and wanted to complete some work… I reached out to my laptop, pressed the power button, and to my astonishment the computer would not advance past the screen where SafeGuard initializes itself, so in other words, I normally would get SafeGuard’s password prompt after which the OS Kernel would start getting decrypted. Alas, this time it stuck at a DOS-like screen with a “Please wait …” message:
So I waited and waited, nothing happened. I attempted to restart the laptop and it booted just to stuck at the same screen again. At this point I booted my home desktop PC and started to poke around what I was able to Bing out. To my surprise, not many resources provided something useful for my case. The last website I opted to look at was Utimaco’s Knowledgebase. There I saw a picture of the screen I was getting. The web posting was detailed, but I could not link what was written in it to what needs to be done in order to be able to boot my laptop successfully. l was about to leave this page and suffer a demise not being able to resolve the problem. Having a quick break I even was dreaming how our administrator would take my laptop on Monday and re-image it, and then I would need to start installing all the software from the beginning. Awful thoughts!
While taking this short break I was starting to suspect that something is different from what I use at home versa work, specifically, I knew I plugged different keyboards to the machine, then I started memorizing the page offered several key-stokes to press at that screen. Hmm, something to ponder I thought, so I went back to my desktop and printed the web page out, then took the paper to my laptop that was still showing the Please wait … prompt. I decided to start with the Shift-F7 combination because it was the option that made the most sense to me.
Whoola!! The laptop emitted a message Toggle USB 2.0 Support!:
Yeah, with the exclamation mark (I have no idea why) and proceeded to the SafeGuard’s password screen. Wow. The laptop has booted. I was feeling a lot better at this stage.
Well, most importantly I do not know why SafeGuard would stop at that screen till today, but on and off, I do use this combination to boot it at home or at work.
Happy booting!