0

My laptop is broken, and I have to give it to a service tech soon. Unfortunately, I can not easily take off the hard drive with this model, it's deep inside. So I am frantically looking for ways to encrypt it instead.

So I found TrueCrypt, encrypted one of my 4 partitions, which took me 3 hours, and only then it warned me that I can't reuse the same drive letter. It is unclear, maybe it will let me reuse it if I delete my old partition letter in Windows, but I am not taking risks at this point unless I know for sure. I looked up for instructions on decrypting the same drive, and they are kind of complex; not to mention, they might take longer to execute than my computer can live.

Questions:

  1. Is there a way to mount my new encrypted partition using the old drive letter?
  2. If not, and I decrypt the drive, what alternative options are available to me? I'm using Windows 7 professional 64 bit. (BitLocker is not available with my version, right?)
4
  • What is laptop make/model? Feb 6, 2014 at 3:48
  • @Ramhound, are you sure? That's not what I found out in my search. Could you please provide a link?
    – Ruby
    Feb 6, 2014 at 4:13
  • 1
    I would also add that you should back up all your data now - they'll likely just re-image the machine before they give it back to you (if they don't replace it entirely).
    – user55325
    Feb 6, 2014 at 5:30
  • Cant you rename drive letters in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices . I have not tried it with encrypted drives and I am not sure if it helps. superuser.com/questions/443800/…
    – arundevma
    Feb 6, 2014 at 9:26

1 Answer 1

0
  • Go to Run.
  • Type in compmgmt.msc and press Enter to open Microsoft Management Console /Computer Management.
  • Select Storage.
  • Select Disk Management and wait a second or two for it to initialize.
  • Right-click on the drive who's letter you want to change.
  • Click on Change Drive Letters and Paths....
  • In the window, select the drive again and click Change...
  • Assign it the old letter such as C from the dropdown.
  • Click OK.
  • Click OK again.
  • Voila.

This is supposed to work but as always, I chime in and jump in the bandwagon and say, "Please backup!".

Hope I could help! :)

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .