I recently needed to recover some information from a PGP Virtual Disk (a .pgd file) that I created back in about 2012. This drive was created with PGP Desktop v8.
After a long adventure, it turned out that the information I wanted wasn’t even stored in this disk, but it was such a hassle to figure this out I thought I’d write up a bit of it in case it’s useful to others.
PGP Desktop was, back at that time, software sold by PGP Corporation. This company was later purchased by Symantec, and the application was then changed to Symantec Encryption Desktop. In 2019 it was bought by Broadcom.
At some point along this journey, it became seemingly basically impossible to buy this software as a single user. As far as I can tell, you can only buy the software from Broadcom (or more accurately, from a Broadcom distribution) as part of a volume licensing arrangement, starting at something like 50 seats.
This is obviously ludicrous if you just want a single license to muck around with. This fits with what little I know about Broadcom – that they are a company only interested in working with enterprise clients, and everyone else can more or less get lost.
I finally found the installer for PGP on an old backup drive. Hoping this is useful to someone else looking to resurrect old data, the details are:
Filename: PGP8.exe
sha1sum: 38c43ef41b9c15996bdaeb1711d2ca0afe99ada5
I am unwilling to post the file due to copyright concerns, but from a quick look it seems to be available online, and as long as the sha1 matches, you should be OK. (Not a guarantee. Use with caution.)
Unfortunately this would not install on Windows 10 – it started the install process and seemed to complete, prompting for a reboot, but it wouldn’t install any shortcuts or map any files, and it wouldn’t start the activation process. I suspect whatever kernel-level magic it needs is simply not compatible with Windows 10.
I figured Windows XP would work, but then it was a struggle of finding a Windows XP machine. I ended up using the following ISO which I found on archive.org:
Filename: en_windows_xp_professional_with_service_pack_3_x86_cd_vl_x14-73974.iso
sha1sum: 66ac289ae27724c5ae17139227cbe78c01eefe40
I was hugely reluctant to use this ISO, like I am with any random executables on the Internet, but that sha1sum shows up in searches in documents well over 10 years old, and seems relatively reliable. Of course, approach with extreme caution, and limit your exposure as much as possible.
The PGP Desktop installer worked perfectly on a VirtualBox VM spun up with this ISO – until I got to the activation stage. I tried my original license details, but of course the activation servers are long since gone, so short of reverse engineering the activation process and faking a valid response (which sounds fun but who has the time), this is a no go.
Fortunately, PGP Desktop was created in an era where the Internet was still considered to be not always present, and the creators built in a manual, offline activation process.
A quick search and I found a random manual license authorisation that worked perfectly. I am reluctant to post the details here but here are some clues to help you find one – there are many references to them online. A websearch for the following string, with quotes, should give you some options:
"BEGIN PGP LICENSE AUTHORIZATION" "PGP Desktop" "PGP Enterprise"
Once I had this done, I was able to mount my old .pgd file and access the information (to discover at this point the information I wanted wasn’t even in there).