Accidentally overwrote Truecrypt Bootloader

Hello,

fist off two apologies:
- I am Dutch, so I might misformulate a couple of things.
- I created this account after doing extensive searching on Google, reading dozens of articles, and finding this would be my best shot. So I apologize for having my problem as my first post and contribution to this form.
I hope I catch up some knowledge so I can help other people afterwards.

I also read many threads listed on this forum, especially the ones where Danz is involved, and I realize all might not be lost. However, I also realize my problem might not be solvable at all. So here it goes, I really hope someone can help.

I do not have a Truecrypt Rescue disk, but I do know the password for the encrypted drive.

I have 2 hard disks in my PC. One of 240GB, and 1 of 80GB.
On the 240GB disk I installed Windows 7 Ultimate, and after having Windows in stalled, I did an full system disk encryption using Truecrypt. For the whole procedure, including installing Windows, I had my 80 GB disk detached.

After that, I attached the 80GB hard disk, and detached the 240GB hard disk, and installed Windows 7 on it. Obviously, there is no dual-boot here, I could simply press F8 upon starting my PC, and let it automatically boot into the 240GB disk or press F8 to let it boot the 80GB one.

For conversation sake, Ill call the Windows install on the 240GB disk Windows 1 and the one on the 80GB disk Windows 2.

The setup I had in mind was to have one 'clean' system (Windows 1) and the Windows 2 to mess around with. I assigned the 80GB disk a drive letter within Windows 1 so I could transfer data to it.
Within Windows 2, I set the 240GB hard disk to offline.

So far so good, and all went well for almost a year.
Until I decided to install Kubuntu on the 80GB disk.

First off, Kubuntu would not start via an USB drive. So I decided to use the Wubi-installer. Stupid as I am, I forgot to detach the 240GB hard disk. I realized that when I was already half way through the installation. I decided to let it run since any possible damage would have been already.
The installation of Kubuntu went well
After rebooting I was presented with an unknown bootloader, of which I now know it is called grub and is the default Linux bootloader.

After this, all gets blurry since I kind of freaked out when trying to boot into the 240Gb disk. There was a problem (I cannot boot it) and I do not know what the actual error message was, since I have tried to fix it (see below)
The error message now states 'error' but that has a different reason (see below)

After finding out I could not boot the encrypted 240GB disk any more, I Googled and tried to mount it 'without pre-boot authentication' It stated my password is wrong. I now know this is because the bootloader is broken and Truecrypt does not know where to find it.
I also tried to recover the backup data at the end of the disk, but it didn't work (Truecrypt could not find it)

I used test disk to analyze the disk, but the 240GB disk was not recognized as an Truecrypt disk.
So far, I only analyzed, and wrote nothing else to the disk. (As far as I know)

I setup an USB drive with Hiren's boot CD and started 'Super Grub 2 Disk'
I let it search for any operating system, it found a few, and I let it rewrite the grub configuration files to disk.

Now when I try to start the 240GB disk, it just states 'error'


To sum up:
- I did 2 Windows installs 'seperately' without dual-boot.
- Installed Kubuntu when both drives were attached.
- Found that I could not boot into the 240GB drive any more.
- Did some analyzing, but did not wrote anyting to disk.
- Used Super Grub Disk and now I get an message stating 'error' upon booting.

some more info:
When looking at the disk via Windows 7 Disk Management, I see a 8MB partition which is unallocated, and a 232.88 partition that is RAW. When I looked at the disk within Parted Magic, I saw three partitions. One little at the beginning, the big encrypted one, and one little at the back. If this is important, I could prepare a new USB drive and look it up again.

I really hope someone can help.

Regards,

Nck.

 

Just reformatted my system drive.
No more need for help.

 

Welcome to Wilders! I'm sorry to hear about the problems you had. I wouldn't have been any help, but your experience is a good example of how important saving the Truecrypt Rescue disk is. I'm not sure how helpful it would have been though if you overwrote most of that data during the Kubuntu install. I hope you had data backups and didn't lose anything important.