Truecrypt- decrypting system drive failed!

I have had my laptop system drive encrypted with truecrypt for a few months and everything has been ok. I decided I wanted to decrypt the drive so I gave it a go. The system hung up somehow during the process and decrypting was stopped with 67% still encrypted. I put in the truecypt rescue disc that I had created and tried to decrypt from there but still it would not go and gave an error message. The system would still boot into windows though and once loaded showed that 67% of the drive was still encrypted in truecrypt. I tried a number of times to get it to finish decrypting but they all failed. I finally gave up and restored my computer with backup discs to before when I started using truecrypt encryption on the system drive. I was able to save all my files at least and only lost a little of my own time to get this sorted out.

Although it is too late to know now since I restored my computer, was there anything I could have done in this case? The system was stuck at 67% encrypted, although I could still enter in my truecrypt password and boot up windows in this state which I was grateful for b/c a saved some files. I am hesitant to use truecrypt on the system drive again at this point b/c the decrypting process failed. An error came up sayying something about a disc or drive error 10 I believe when I tried to decrypt further using the truecrypt rescue disc. Any ideas or thoughts? Thanks

 

Well, my first thought is run diagnostics on the hardware because your drive might be starting to fail.

Other than that, I'm not sure off hand. Probably one thing I might have tried was to re-encrypt the 32% (or part of it) then decrypt again.

 

I would have ran scandisk to look for a missing file that would cause it to become stuck. If that didn't work I would have tried to re-encrypt the 33% then decrypt again.

 

Thanks for the replies. I should have asked for help first before pulling out my restore disc so that maybe one of your ideas would have worked. Oh well no real harm done at least as I haven't lost any of my data. I just bought another external HD to give me more room to do more frequent backups also as I tend to put them off for longer than I should. I will likely try encrypting the system again at some point, but don't feel like it right away. Thanks

 

Yea, I'm planning on doing the same thing here shortly. Its hard to make backups though when you have 1.2TB of space on your system. Hopefully I've found a good deal on a 1.5TB drive and I'll run backups to that.

 

It sounds like you could have copied off your data while Windows was booted. Even if you can't finish the decryption, if it boots you should be able to read most everything on the disk.

 

Yes I was able to copy data from my drive from within windows without issue so nothing was lost. Really it wouldn't have been much of a loss of data anyway as I do backups semi-regularly and this was only one of my 5 personal computers and most important data is duplicated on another computer or on external drive.