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Help Encryption failure, cannot get past "Enter password to decrypt storage"

L

lpallard

Guest
Hi,

my first post on this forum, and I must admit, I'm rather pissed...

Basically, I have been using my motorola droid razr (simply called razr here in canada) for about 4 months.. I have a 32GB SD card with about 18GB of files (music and a few pictures/videos). This morning I forgot my phone on the countertop at the local gas bar.. When I went back there to get it, I was fortunate enough to get it back and realized encryption could be a good thing since I use my device as a PDA and have everything in it (contacts, calendar, emails, etc....).

I decided to activate encryption on BOTH the internal storage and the SD card.. Big mistake. At first, the phone rebooted by itself (as it said it would do) then upon restarting, I would get to the "Enter your PIN" screen, and upon pressing the enter key, I would get about 20 pop-up saying "The application XXXXXXX has stiopped working unexpectedly"... Then it would totally freeze. Power key wouldnt even work.

I used the emergency reboot (power+Vol down for 10 s) and pulled the SD card thinking it might be the problem.. The phone indeed got past the last stage but now I get to the "Enter the password to decrypt storage" and upon successfully entering my password, the device simply reboots. I tried about 50 times, it simply reboots..

What is going on? Have I lost everything?

Any help is appreciated. I called Motorola, they are useless... They said to reset to factory. Whats the point of a device paid $650+ is I cant even rely on it?????? Not impressed by both Android and Motorola....

Thanks to all who can help me..
 
According to Motorola which were nearly useless, resetting the phone to factory settings was the only choice... Which I did but lost everything, 438 contacts, and hundreds of calendar events/appointements I did not have a chance to sync yet with my exchange server... Not to mention all pictures, 18 GB of music and tons of other stuff I did not have a backup yet..

With all the problems I had so far with this phone, and playing with numerous android tablets and phones for friends and relatives, and hearing what people have to say about this OS, I'd personally say android = Plain failure as far as I am concerned.

Thanks android..., Im going back to Apple as soon as I can. Period. :mad:
 
Picture and music should not be affected by a factory reset. Items on the SD card are 'safe'. The only things lost should be your personal settings and apps.
 
Yeah the SD card wasnt recognized by the phone after the factory reset.. It said "This SD card has been secured using a different device. It will have to be formatted" (Or something similar to this..)

My biggest grip is the fact that I've lost my calendar & contacts..

The contacts and calendar were synchronized to an exchange server. I have been away from the exchange server for 3 weeks now and therefore havent had a chance to sync my changes between then & now. All is lost?

Where does android store the info?
 
I have enabled encryption of my Droid Razr for the entire device using the Settings > Data Encryption > settings. I have checked both of the following: Storage - Encrypts files you save to your memory card and internal phone storage. Device data - Encrypts all personal data on your phone. I did not check Key protection as I do not know what that means.

Under Application encryption I checked the boxes for Email, Calendar, and Contacts. I understand that this will supposedly slow my phone down enough that I can only capture 720p video, but that is fine with me.

I have not noticed any slowdown in normal use of the phone, so I suspect it only becomes an issue when you are trying to store data flat-out as when recording video.

Any data already on the SD card will NOT become encrypted by activating these encryption options, nor will data moved onto the SD card by tethering to a computer at any time.

In order to encrypt the SD card the data must be moved there by an application ON THE PHONE and AFTER encryption has been enabled. So instead of copying files onto the SD card by tether, I use an FTP app on the phone and transfer over the WiFi which works great. You could also just copy the file to internal storage and back to the SD card using the internal file manager app.

I would suggest only putting data you have backups of onto an encrypted SD card. If you store your phone pictures on the SD card, email them, Dropbox them, or do something to get yourself an off-device backup as soon as possible. I also suggest not moving essential apps to the SD card if it is encrypted.

I say this because I have twice suddenly had everything on the SD card become unreadable either by the phone or by a PC. I don't know if an update caused the OS to rebuild with a new encryption key or what. The files are still there and the names (which appear NOT to get encrypted) are visible, but the files themselves generate an error when you attempt to access them. The files on the Razr internal memory have never become corrupted or unreadable, just the SD card. I have no idea what causes this, although I suspect a major phone update was responsible for one of the incidents. So, as long as you have backups, encrypt away. It works great.
 
I don't know what you did in the process of encrypting your phone but I think the mistake was yours, not the android system. I've encrypted and remove the encryption on not only my RazR but on my previously owned, Droid X. The previous reply is also correct in that any information that was already on the card was not encrypted and should still be accessible to you. Put it in a sd card reader and transfer the information to your computer than try reformatting the sd card and transferring the information back to the card from the computer. Good luck. Busy or not, anything can fail, be lost or stollen, always have a plan b.
 
Probably my mistake =>possible.. not sure where tough since encrypting is more or less done by pressing a button .. anyways maybe encrypting too many files at once was the problem..

Ill backup everything and retry at a later time..

Being used to apple where nothing has failed me its obviously frustrating when this happens.
 
One issue I have with the Android approach to securing the device is that there is only one choice, you secure the entire device, and are required to punch in a code to do anything, or you do not secure anything. By the way you have the same choice on iOS.
I use my phone as a PDA and I want to have access to confidential documents on my phone, but I am not too worried about my contacts or appointments. Also, I do not want to have to punch in a code just to check my mail or read my texts.
So I installed DropBox and BoxCryptor. Dropbox allows me to share folders with my PC(s) (and I also like the picture upload feature, very cool) and I have setup an encrypted folder on my DropBox which requires a password each time I want to access it.
This way, the data that I care most about is protected while the more basic phone features are easily accessible. I realize that this leaves my email and text messages open to anyone who steals my phone, but I am willing to live with this for the convenience.
 
Being used to apple where nothing has failed me its obviously frustrating when this happens
Click to expand...
Many people have not had problems with their Android phone. I am one of those, but apple has had its share of problems as well, just check the bulletin boards.
One area where apple may have an edge is that they screen submissions to the apple store much better (Goggle does not screen at all), so the quality of apps in the apple store may be better, at least the quality in terms of less likely to screw up your system. The quality in terms of usefulness is another thing.
Since apple has a limited number of devices, when problems do occur, they tend to be very widespread.
 
didier9 said:
One issue I have with the Android approach to securing the device is that there is only one choice, you secure the entire device, and are required to punch in a code to do anything, or you do not secure anything. By the way you have the same choice on iOS.
I use my phone as a PDA and I want to have access to confidential documents on my phone, but I am not too worried about my contacts or appointments. Also, I do not want to have to punch in a code just to check my mail or read my texts.
So I installed DropBox and BoxCryptor. Dropbox allows me to share folders with my PC(s) (and I also like the picture upload feature, very cool) and I have setup an encrypted folder on my DropBox which requires a password each time I want to access it.
This way, the data that I care most about is protected while the more basic phone features are easily accessible. I realize that this leaves my email and text messages open to anyone who steals my phone, but I am willing to live with this for the convenience.
Click to expand...
didier9,

I just read your post after doing a search about anyone using Boxcryptor. So happens that I have been doing the same thing since getting my Razr Maxx in June. I have used it with Dropbox and BC without any problems until just recently when I bought a Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. The tablet will simply not accept the pw. After having contact with a BC support person, I followed the advice given, which was to sign off of all devices, including my PC's, and then on one, change the pw and try again. I did all of that and now, not only does my tablet still not permit the pw, but neither does my phone!

My PCs are fine, so it is definitely not the PW. Any thoughts or similar experience?
 
Follow-up.

I resolved the mysterious problem. Had to do with multiple .encfs6.xml files in the wrong places. Cleaned them up and now everything is working great on all devices. Secure once again.
 
Glad you got it resolved. It has been working perfectly for me, and the same Dropbox + BC accounts are synched on multiple computers in addition to my phone.
 
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