Truecrypt partition corrupted, not recognized by Testcrypt
Posted: 29 Jul 2013, 03:51
Hello everybody,
I just moved to another country and decided to bring some personal and important experimental data with me on an encrypted partition on a new hard disk (WD My Passport 1 TB). Using Truecrypt 7.1a, I filled the disk with random data and then created two main partitions. The first (NTFS; 465.80 GB) contains some data that I did not consider sensitive. The second (RAW; 465.67) contains both a hidden and a normal Truecrypt partition. Unfortunately, when I arrived at my destination I was no longer able to mount either one of these encrypted partitions. It appears that the headers may have been corrupted, as neither one of my partitions could be decrypted using my passwords.
After trying to recover the volumes with truecrypt (restore volume header), I tried to find the partitions using the nice TestCrypt application. Unfortunately TestCrypt found no evidence of any of the two partitions. I then decided to give TestDisk a try to see if there were some errors on the disk that could account for these problems. Here's the results of my quick scan:
Disk /dev/sdb - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121597 255 63
The harddisk <1000 GB / 931 GiB> seems too small! << 4791 GB / 4462 GiB>
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings. BIOS detection...
The following partitions can't be removed:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
HPFS-NTFS 268185 192 51 487311 163 13 3520257326
FAT32 340701 116 43 582561 51 44 3885476801
HPFS-NTFS 376245 50 16 461034 185 5 1362143780
After clicking Continue, the following appeared:
HPFS-NTFS 0 32 33 60806 235 37 976861184 [Backup]
Could any of these errors be related to the problems I have with Truecrypt? And why did Testdisk report an FAT32 partition. Any suggestion or ideas on what steps to take next to try and recover the encrypted data are highly appreciated! Thanks!
Jasper
I just moved to another country and decided to bring some personal and important experimental data with me on an encrypted partition on a new hard disk (WD My Passport 1 TB). Using Truecrypt 7.1a, I filled the disk with random data and then created two main partitions. The first (NTFS; 465.80 GB) contains some data that I did not consider sensitive. The second (RAW; 465.67) contains both a hidden and a normal Truecrypt partition. Unfortunately, when I arrived at my destination I was no longer able to mount either one of these encrypted partitions. It appears that the headers may have been corrupted, as neither one of my partitions could be decrypted using my passwords.
After trying to recover the volumes with truecrypt (restore volume header), I tried to find the partitions using the nice TestCrypt application. Unfortunately TestCrypt found no evidence of any of the two partitions. I then decided to give TestDisk a try to see if there were some errors on the disk that could account for these problems. Here's the results of my quick scan:
Disk /dev/sdb - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121597 255 63
The harddisk <1000 GB / 931 GiB> seems too small! << 4791 GB / 4462 GiB>
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings. BIOS detection...
The following partitions can't be removed:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
HPFS-NTFS 268185 192 51 487311 163 13 3520257326
FAT32 340701 116 43 582561 51 44 3885476801
HPFS-NTFS 376245 50 16 461034 185 5 1362143780
After clicking Continue, the following appeared:
HPFS-NTFS 0 32 33 60806 235 37 976861184 [Backup]
Could any of these errors be related to the problems I have with Truecrypt? And why did Testdisk report an FAT32 partition. Any suggestion or ideas on what steps to take next to try and recover the encrypted data are highly appreciated! Thanks!
Jasper