When attempting to run Symantec Drive Encryption (formerly known as PGP Whole Disk Encryption) on a disk, you receive the following one of below errors.

PGP Error

This disk does not appear to have a valid volume. PGP Whole Disk can only encrypt disks with at least one valid volume

or

Symantec Error

This disk does not appear to have a valid volume. Symantec Drive Encryption can only encrypt disks with at least one valid volume

When encrypting via pgpwde command line you will receive an error -1200: bad parameters.

Unsupported Disk Type or Partition Type being used on hard disk installed in the system.

This error can occur when attempting to encrypt an unsupported disk type such as RAID disk drive. The following lists detail the supported and unsupported disk types for use with Symantec Drive Encryption.

Supported Disk Types
The Symantec Drive Encryption feature protects the contents of the following types of disks:

• Desktop or laptop disks, including solid-state drives (either partitions or the entire disk)
• External disks, excluding music devices and digital cameras
• USB flash disks, thumb drives
• Hardware RAID1 and RAID5 with MBR partitioning style

Unsupported Disk Types
The following disk types are not supported:

• Software RAID
• Hardware RAID if formatted with GPT partitioning style
• Dynamic disks
• Diskettes and CD-RW/DVD-RWs
• Drives over 2TB in size. These drives use GPT partitions since the maximum size of an MBR partition is 2TB.

Unsupported Partition Types
All partition Types except 04 (FAT16), 06 (FAT16B), 07 (NTFS), 0B (FAT32) are unsupported by Symantec Encryption Desktop.

Determine if a Disk is Dynamic or using GPT partitions with Windows 7

If it is not readily evident the drives in question may be using GPT or not, using diskpart on Windows 7 can allow an easy view of this. 

1. To view this, take the drive in question to a Windows 7 machine and plug it in (if the disk is external).   If the disk in question is a fixed disk, then the system in question must be Windows 7.
2. Open a command prompt (Start, in the search field, type: cmd) and type: diskpart and press enter.  This will open a command prompt for the Diskpart utility.
3. Type: list disk and press enter. 

   • This will display a listing of each of the drives.  The first disk in the list will be labeled "Disk 0".  The second disk is "Disk 1" etc.  The results will display several columns.  Ensure that the drives in question do not have an asterisk (*) symbol under the "Dynamic" or "GPT" columns.  If so, these disks are not supported by Symantec Drive Encryption and cannot be encrypted.

4. Type exit to quit out of the Diskpart utility.

 Determine Partition Type with Windows 7

1. To view this, take the drive in question to a Windows 7 machine and plug it in (if the disk is external).   If the disk in question is a fixed disk, then the system in question must be Windows 7.
2. Open a command prompt (Start, in the search field, type: cmd) and type: diskpart and press enter.  This will open a command prompt for the Diskpart utility.
3. Type: list disk and press enter. 
4. Type: select disk X where X is number of your drive in question from above command output
5. Type: list partition
6. Type: select partition Y where Y is number of the volume from above command
7. Type: detail partition
   • This will display partition details for selected partition from selected disk. Note the number of Partition Type next to Type in the output of above command
8. Type exit to quit out of the Diskpart utility.

Applies To

PGP Desktop 10.2.x

PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.2.x

Symantec Encryption Desktop 10.3.x

Symantec Drive Encryption 10.3.x