Weird Truecrypt situation

I have Truecrypt 7.1 installed on a Windows 7 computer, and am not using system encryption. I may have had the system drive (a SSD) encrypted in the past but I'm not certain, it's a few years old. Tonight the computer restarted at some point while I was away, and booted to the Truecrypt bootloader. Weird.

I enter the most likely password, get a message saying invalid password or not a truecrypt partition. Reset, and it boots back into the bootloader. Pull the power, boot from scratch, and the system boots into Windows perfectly.

One other oddity, the bootloader version didn't match the version of Truecrypt that I have installed (bootloader 6.1.a, Truecrypt 7.1).

Has anyone run into this before? SSD dying/Truecrypt installation issue, or something more sinister?

 

Really weird. Did you ever dual boot on that box? I wonder what would show if you looked at the boot loader code in a hex editor? I hope that password isn't used anywhere else Fresh wipe and re-install? Weird...

PD

 

There are various things that can unexpectedly change the boot-up options in Win7; I've run into this with different versions of "Perfect Disk" in that a few times the Boot/Defrag option didn't work because of something wrong in the boot-up; reinstalling the program fixed the problem. There were also some MS fixes for Win7 that caused widespread problems due to boot loader code.

If you still have the TC recovery disk you made when you encrypted your system, that has the option to remove the TC bootloader, and can most likely fix your problem. If you no longer have the disk, you can make a new one by telling TC to encrypt the operating system, creating the disk, then cancelling the encryption process. Then use the disk as a start up and choose the option to remove the bootloader.

Edit Alternatively the Win7 repair disk can repair the bootloader. End Edit

Hope that helps...

__

 

Update, after fooling around with my boot settings, it turns out that remnants of an old system encryption setup were left on one of my non-system drives. The drive has long been unencrypted, but the loader is still there. When I crashed/restarted, for some reason the boot order got messed up, bypassing my system drive and looking to one of the others to boot from.

Still doesn't explain the random restart, but at least I know why TC is involved. Thanks for the replies

 

I just had the same thing happen on a computer. Hard reset somehow messed up the UEFI BIOS boot order. When the re-image didn't work, I knew something was up - so much for technological advances

PD