My hard drive is failing to boot and I tried to decrypt the drive. The whole drive is encrypted which I know now is not what you should do but I am not familiar with encryption. I wanted to prevent a roommate who was a computer guy with privacy boundary issues and I wanted the easiest way to do it. Now I'm in this mess. I had no idea that truecrypt wouldn't let me recover my stuff if I couldn't start windows. I have read what I should have done and all the advice in previous posts about how to set up truecrypt in the beginning and that encryption is actually big headache but I didn't know that at the time. If I knew I wouldn't have bothered. My drive a 1tb drive and the drive is stopping at around the 800gb mark. It asks do I want to skip bad sectors and I say yes but nothing happens. Is my stuff gone forever? If I put a new hard drive into the computer and load windows on to the new drive does this mean the old drive will not work again with the computer? Should I not put in a new drive and load windows on it because this will definitely stop any chance of recovering my stuff? I am not an expert but I have looked at lot of the previous posts and it looks like I have a big problem. I would like to know where I go from here. Thanks
Hi all. My hard drive failed and didn't allow me to start windows. I tried to decrypt the drive with Truecrypt's rescue disc. It went well but then it started slowing down and getting errors because of bad sectors. Now it has stopped completely. My hard drive is 1tb in size. I have 800gb remaining to decrypt. I am running windows 7. Is there anything I can do to get my stuff back? Please, any help would be great. Maybe I can repair the bad sectors and clone the drive and then decrypt? Is that even an option? I have also thought about putting in a new hard drive into the computer and installing windows again because buying a new computer is so expensive. If I were to do this could I still try to decrypt the old hard drive? Or would I be in a worse position than I am now? There are so many knowledgeable people here. Thanks for your expertise.
My advice is to make an RAW disk image of the HDD using WinHex, or the pro/business version of Recuvva, then start the data rescuing process.
Thank you! Does this mean I take the hard drive out of the laptop, and with another laptop and hard drive make an image with Recuvva or WinHex and with the new hard drive with the image on it start the rescue process? Thanks again.