Truecrypt drive: boot sector damaged?
Posted: 03 Oct 2018, 19:12
Hello, it appears my encrypted external USB-drive with 1TB of data has suddenly become inaccessible. I got a message that said, the volume header has become corrupted and it will use the backup header stored in the volume, but it didn't mount. I was eventually able to mount the volume by restoring the header from an external backup file, but i still can't access the files, it says it needs to be formatted.
When it was still working fine, there was always an inaccessible drive E:\ under "My Computer" and the Truecrypt volume remained hidden until mounted. When the header got corrupted, drive E:\ showed up as an empty, formatted hard drive. After restoring the backup header, drive E: is now entirely gone and the Truecrypt volume shows up as uninitialized with unallocated space in Disk Management.
A scan with Testcrypt shows a few results but it can't mount any of them:
Contrary to Windows Disk Management, i can see two entries for the external drive in TestDisk: one with the correct name and the mounted drive (X:)
Selecting the mounted Disk "X:" and "None" for the partition type, i get this:
It looks like the boot sector and the backup are bad, therefore no access to the file system. So far, i haven't tried to rebuild the BS, because i am not entirely sure if i am doing the right thing (or if it will even work, since the backup is bad, too). I just want to avoid making things worse and causing further damage. If i choose "Intel", it says "The partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55". Is it safe to rebuild the boot sector or do i need to to something else?
When it was still working fine, there was always an inaccessible drive E:\ under "My Computer" and the Truecrypt volume remained hidden until mounted. When the header got corrupted, drive E:\ showed up as an empty, formatted hard drive. After restoring the backup header, drive E: is now entirely gone and the Truecrypt volume shows up as uninitialized with unallocated space in Disk Management.
A scan with Testcrypt shows a few results but it can't mount any of them:
Contrary to Windows Disk Management, i can see two entries for the external drive in TestDisk: one with the correct name and the mounted drive (X:)
Selecting the mounted Disk "X:" and "None" for the partition type, i get this:
It looks like the boot sector and the backup are bad, therefore no access to the file system. So far, i haven't tried to rebuild the BS, because i am not entirely sure if i am doing the right thing (or if it will even work, since the backup is bad, too). I just want to avoid making things worse and causing further damage. If i choose "Intel", it says "The partition sector doesn't have the endmark 0xAA55". Is it safe to rebuild the boot sector or do i need to to something else?