McAfee DE 7.3 booting directly into DETech

[Ufoto]

Hello,

Recently we started to rollout DE 7.3 to some of our customers and we are also testing the new feature 'Allow users to perform disaster recovery using DETech'. Shortly after we started to roll out this policy we received few complains that a small percentage of the systems are booting directly into DETech. When the challenge-response procedure is done and emergency boot is performed, this no longer happens. 

As far as I understand it, the DETech is now added as an extra boot device into the system's boot order. The only explanation I can think of is if the drive is not recognized as a boot device (however then the system should not be able to boot even after recovery), or if the boot order was manually changed (I doubt this too as the affected users are not technical at all). 

Am I missing something? Is someone aware of such known issues, or did someone encounter this too?

Thank you in advance!

[cross]

If your policy has the option enabled to add in the onboard DETech, the files should be placed and a boot entry should be added but it should not be taking over or taking the primary spot in the boot order.  Have you noticed a pattern as to a specific make and/or model of systems that have this reported?  While in this state, does the boot order still list the Windows Boot Manager?

[MKu]

We also have this problem.

On the notebooks where this happened, all other bootmenu options were deleted, DETech was the only remaining. This explains why it was booting directly into the DETech..

To fix this manually we had to readd the Windows Boot Manager in BIOS, after that it boots as expected.Its interesting that you mention that i was fixed after an emergency boot, will test if we get another case.

Unfortunately we also dont have an explanation why this is happening, its also only a very small percentage who had this problem

[kblowe]

This is also happening with in our organization.

We will try to re-add the Windows Boot Manager if its missing. We have to check that to if its help before we decrypt and reimage the laptops. Thanks.

We are also opening a SR with McAfee Tech Support on this issue.

[kblowe]

Thanks. Re-adding the Windows Boot Manager in BIOS, and laptops boot as expected.

I think we end of unchecking the DETech recovery option in the MDE policy since this feature with 7.3 obviously hasn't been tested for issues.

[kblowe]

We are also experiencing this issue 7.3.1. This DETech recovery option is enabled is causing issues we don't need. The laptops are booting to the DETech recovery screen, no MDE preboot. We have to choose emergency boot to access the laptop. Once online and later restart the machine you are presented with the DETech recovery screen yet again. We have seen this on Dell 7400 2n1 and 5511 models so far.

Should we uncheck DETech Recovery option to prevent this from happening to more laptops?

Has anyone opened a SR with technical support for this issue? We will at this point.

[jasonlawrence]

We have had 7.3 deployed for a while and just recently have started seeing a small number of random users having this issue. 

[kblowe]

Hi, you should open a case with McAfee Tech Support so they are aware that this is a known issue and someone should investigate it further.

We opened a case with McAfee Tech Support last month and at the time they wanted us to gather BIOS boot order information & ESP contents from a system with the issue. By that time we had already re-added the Windows Boot Manager to the few systems with the problem to get the users back up and working promptly.

During that time we halted deployment of 7.3 HF2 (7.3.0.183). We are now unchecking this DETech recovery option from the DE policy and will start back updating our systems with 7.3 HF2. We will no longer continue to use the DETech recovery option via policy (even though convenient ) due to lack of investigation into this known issue.

I guess its back to the old days of using DETech via a USB stick.