TrueCrypt volume no longer accepts password

Discussion in 'encryption problems' started by Tetrin Khaya, Jun 16, 2016.

  1. Tetrin Khaya

    Tetrin Khaya Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jun 14, 2016
    Posts:
    3
    Location:
    United States
    greetings, all.

    i'm trying to recover data from a TrueCrypt (v7.1a) volume which is not accepting the correct password.

    i encrypted the system partition on my laptop (running Windows 7), then encrypted the second drive in the laptop with a different password. everything ran smoothly for several months, until i decided to abandon the encryption altogether. i decrypted the system partition first, and immediately after doing this, the second drive could not be mounted/decrypted, and TrueCrypt returned the 'Incorrect password or not a TrueCrypt volume' message.

    so...what could have happened?
    and more importantly, could the problem be reversible?

    :
    :

    there are two additional bits of information i feel i should add, which may or may not be relevant:

    1) in a frustrated and tired moment, i tried to restore the TrueCrypt header to the second drive from a backup file, only to discover afterward that i had restored the header from a completely different TrueCrypt volume. unfortunately, there is no backup header for the volume i'm trying to recover.

    2) the laptop was setup to dual boot between Kali Linux & Windows 7. Kali was encrypted with LUKS, and the grub bootloader gave the option of which OS to boot into. i did something wrong here, and mounting and decrypting Kali never worked automatically, and always had to be done manually, but i never had issues with Win7 in TrueCrypt.
     
  2. Tetrin Khaya

    Tetrin Khaya Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jun 14, 2016
    Posts:
    3
    Location:
    United States
    as a minor update to this, i tried to restore the volume header from the embedded backup, but the only password it accepted was the password to the incorrect volume header i mistakenly restored earlier. after which, of course, the partition showed as unformatted, and as 'not contain[ing] a recognized file system'.

    i seriously don't know what could have gone wrong...does anyone have any ideas? even crazy ones?

    ...since i do know the original volume password, would it be possible to manually reconstruct a TrueCrypt header?
     
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