Raxco PerfectDisk v8.0 & TrueCrypt v4.3a

[milo47]

Greetings. Hope this is approximately the right place to post this question.

I've been using Raxco PerfectDisk v8.0 for nearly a year... particularly on external FireWire drives, with no problems whatsoever. Now I've begun using TrueCrypt v4.3a... on entire partitions of those same external drives.

The problem? Unencrypted external FireWire partitions show up fine in the Perfect Disk window and can be defragmented. The newly mounted (hence, visible and on-the-fly decryptable) partitions are not visible to Perfect Disk. Hence, they cannot be defragmented.

This is a serious problem... but surely is only pilot error on my part. Nobody could have possibly overlooked this. Right? What's the secret sauce?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

...Milo47

[dantz]

Are you sure you're using the correct drive letter? Use the drive letter you use to mount the volume, not the Firewire drive letter.

edit:
I did some poking around and found a better answer:

Snipped from:
http://www.raxco.com/Support/kb_detail.cfm?action=faq&prod=1&ver=8.0#kb542

"Why doesn’t PerfectDisk display my USB/firewire/external drives?
By default, PerfectDisk 8.0 does not display external drives connected by a USB or Firewire connection. Even though these drives may represent themselves to Windows as being a fixed hard drive, they may not support defragmentation.

Prior to defragmenting these drives, please verify that Computer Management/Disk Management sees the drive as a fixed drive, that the external drive is on the Windows hardware compability list and check with the exernal drive manufacturer and verify that defragmentation is supported on the external drive.

In addition, Microsoft recommends that you disable Write Caching on external drives.

If the external drive DOES support defragmentation AND Windows Disk Management sees the drive as being a fixed drive, then you can enable removable drive support in PerfectDisk by going to Tools, Advanced Configuration, Removable storage, and select the option to allow defragmenting USB and firewire devices and click ok. The external drive should display once this option is enabled as long as Windows Disk Management sees the drive as being a fixed drive."

(This also implies that you should mount the TrueCrypt volume as a non-removable drive.)