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Has anyone hit trouble unpacking a large collection of files with Endpoint Security Media Encryption EPM Explorer on win7? I'm not a customer of Checkpoint so cannot request support from them.

In detail: I received a hard drive with about 465GB of encrypted data, stored as ".EPM" files at 4.17GB each, the whole mess created by Checkpoint Endpoint Security. I plug in the drive to a win7x64 box, it is recognized just fine after driver install & reboot. Then I run the supplied program Unlock.exe and enter the password. A window opens “Endpoint Security Media Encryption EPM Explorer”. I can see and browse thru a directory tree. I select the top-level item on the left pane, select the top-level folders that appear on the right pane, click the Extract button in the toolbar, browse to choose a destination directory, then click OK.

At that point the GUI just sits, not hung exactly but not doing anything. It shows “Ready …” in the lower-left corner, but the menus do not respond to clicks, and there is no indication that anything is happening. I checked the destination directory, nothing is being written there. I can see in windows task manager that the unlock process is chewing CPU and doing millions of I/O Reads. I waited for about 16 hours without seeing any output or change (i.e., still hung).

However I can extract a single file just fine - I take the same initial steps as described above, expand the directory tree until I find a file, select that single file, click the Extract button, choose a destination directory, click OK. The bottom of the window instantly changes to a progress bar and the thing runs for over half an hour, but eventually the file is written out.

Thanks in advance.

fixer1234
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chrisinmtown
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1 Answers1

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The answer was: be patient and use a plain computer, not a VM. On that plain computer - just a regular old laptop - after following the procedure above I just let it be while the "Endpoint Security Media Encryption EPM Explorer" window appeared to be hung. In the windows task manager I could see it accrue millions of I/O Read operations, with hundreds happening per second. After about 70 minutes of this rather high read rate, the process of file extraction finally started with a progress bar etc.

I should have mentioned before that the computer where it ran for 16+ hours with no progress was a virtual machine, with the encrypted content mounted to the guest as a shared folder from the host. I saw reads happening at a rate of only a few per second, nothing like the rate I saw on the plain computer. I suspect some kind of slowdown occurred in that setup, so the 1+ hour it required on a plain machine was multiplied tenfold or more (just guessing of course).

I still think this is a bug - the Unlock.exe client should put up a progress bar when it's preparing a large extract - but not a fatal bug, just incredibly annoying.

HTH

chrisinmtown
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