Help with FreeOTFE, initialized a disk!

Hello all,

I'm going way out on a limb here, hoping someone on the forum might be able to help me. It seems this in one of the few places I can find where FreeOTFE is being discussed. I'm a long-time user of FreeOTFE and I've had nothing but good experiences with it. Recently though a mistaken mouse-click seems to have done something very bad.

Background: I'm running Windows 7, SP1, 64bit. FreeOTFE version 5.21.00.4058, FreeOTFE Driver 5.00.0000. Mounted volumes are all formatted NTFS.

My issue centers around a 3TB hard drive set as an "Entire Disk" volume. Recently I was having issues with a USB thumb drive so I went into Windows Disk Management to see how it was mounted. I'd forgotten that I had the 3TB hard drive mounted in FreeOTFE in the background. When Disk Management opened up it showed a pop-up box saying

"You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it." It showed a drive, and the choice to initialize it as a MBR partition or GPT. (GUID partition table)

I made a poor assumption that this message concerned my USB thumb drive and clicked to initialize the drive as a MBR partition. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case, the message was about the FreeOTFE volume. I can no longer mount the FreeOTFE volume, when I try I get the following error message:

"Unable to mount volume; please ensure that you entered the correct details ( password, etc)"

In short, I get the same error message as though I was putting in the wrong password. I also have encrypted volume files on other hard drives, they still mount just fine, and it's the same password used on both the volume files as on the Entire Disk volume. All of the volumes were created using the default settings within FreeOTFE, no keyfile, special offset, etc.

I've left that drive alone, and went looking for a solution online. I can't find any mention of anybody else having this problem. I have another blank hard drive that I installed in the system to test with and I've been able to replicate the failure. Within Windows Disk Management the drive with the FreeOTFE whole disk volume shows a partition style of "Unknown" and I can mount and unmount as normal. If I select in the pop-up window to Initialize the drive as MBR then Disk Management shows the partition type as "Basic", and FreeOTFE is no longer able to mount the drive at all.

From what I've read, the developer of the software has disappeared, the website is under new ownership. In short, no official support, and just a few short months later I screwed things up.

Please, if at all possible I could really use any help possible!

Many thanks in advance,

Ryan

 

At this point I'm open to ~ Snipped as per TOS ~ guesses, I've got a spare drive to test ideas on. Please help!

 

Bump.