I have a hard drive with one Truecrypt-encrypted partition using all the space. I also have an SSD, on which I today reinstalled Windows. When I try to mount the Truecrypt partition, I get a warning "The host file/device is already in use". If I continue, I get the error "Cannot mount volume. The host file/device is already in use. Attempt to mount without exclusive access failed as well". I know that having a Truecrypt volume directly on a whole disk can be mistaken by the Windows installer as blank space, and corrupted, however, Windows should have recognised the fact that a partition exists, even if it cannot read it. In Process Explorer, I found only the 'System' process using the disk. Obviously, I cannot kill this process. Can anyone suggest a way that I can get this working again?
I sure hope that a good expert in this forum on that matter can help. There have been issues before with moving TrueCrypt's before and some resolved where others fell short. I use to keep TrueCrypt Container files stored and was successful moving them but never tried a whole volume transfer.
After some investigation, I found that Windows installed a boot loader on my hard drive and this seems to have partially damaged my Truecrypt partition since I can only mount it using the embedded backup header. A hex editor has revealed my original Truecrypt partition seems to begin at sector 2408 on the hard drive. Everything before that seems to be non-random data, e.g. the Windows boot loader. Given the data corruption, when I mount the volume, Windows cannot recognise the NTFS partition and offers me to format it. Does anyone know how to recover the first part of a missing NTFS partition? Only the first 1204kB of the disk appear to have been overwritten and some of this was used by the MBR and VBR. Any advice would be welcome. Thanks
