Need help with Truecrypt on External Hard Drive

Bear with me as I am not anywhere near as computer savvy as most all of you.

I have a laptop (Toshiba) and an external hard drive (Maxtor) I use as a backup for important files. The EHD has 20 gigs used out of 445.
The other day I decided to put Truecrypt on my laptop. No problem.
Yesterday I added it to the EHD. Worked fine-so far so good.
Today my friend told me "if you put TC on an EHD you can only open the EHD on the computer you used to encrypt the EHD". If true that obviously renders useless the whole purpose of the EHD-as a backup for the laptop.So I would like to know 1. Is my friend correct that I cannot access the EHD on another computer than my laptop? 2. If he is wrong how exactly do I go about accessing my EHD on a third computer? 3. If he is right, how can I go about taking TC off my EHD without having to format the EHD?
Thanks in advance and PLEASE keep any response as idiot proof as possible.

 

Your friend is wrong.

2. The same way you do now.

 

You should be able to open your Truecrypt container on ANY computer, provided that:

1. You are able to physically mount the external hard drive on the other computer (hardware compatibility), and
2. You are able to install/run Truecrypt software on the other computer (either full install or portable mode).

The same concept applies to internal hard drives as well.

 

I would just like to add ontop of what others have already stated to make sure you have admin or super user rights on any other computer you try to mount your external drive to.

 

I would partition the external drive into 2 partitions - make about a 1 gig partition, and the 2nd partition for all the rest of the space. The 1 gig partition, I would leave unencrypted, and label the partition "unencrypted partition" or something like that. On that partition I would keep a copy of truecrypt mobile, so that, if you ever wanted to use the hard drive at another location/computer, you wouldn't have to bother with setting up truecrypt on that computer, in order to access your files on the larger encrypted partition. also this small 1 gig partition could be used as a quick go-to partition for temporarily storing files etc when at another computer. The second partition, with all the rest of the space, I would encrypt, and there keep your files

 

I have the particular situation that I want to backup information from a Truecrypt encrypted HDD partition on my notebook to another Truecrypt encrypted partition on an external HDD which I connect to my notebook.

The problem is, how can I manage to mount both volumes in truecrypt at the same time?

On my notebook the Truecrypt partition is hidden and when I mount it, I mount it on E.

Now the external HDD has a partition F and G, G being the one to be mounted via Truecrypt.

Anyone can help with this situation?

 

So what exactly is the problem? Both are mounted, just copy data from E:\ to G:\. Sorry if I missed something.

PD