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I want to install dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu (Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 in this case) both sharing one partition for data with TrueCrypt. Is that possible? Would that work well?

My plan would be for the TrueCrypt partition to be the home partition in Ubuntu, and the D: disk in Windows. Is there a better scheme? Do you have any tips or know of any tutorials for it?

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protected by studiohack♦ May 3 '11 at 9:28

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4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Since its a dual-boot with one OS accessing the partition at a time,
TrueCrypt should have no problems.

All you need is, to isolate the data partition and encrypt it as a volume (rather than the files in it).
Your idea of a D: drive for Windows will work well with a mountable partition for Ubuntu.

After that you need to get the platform specific TrueCrypt binaries on Windows and Ubuntu.

Whichever OS you boot into, just mount the encrypted volume and you are good to go.

This will work and is easy because,

  1. TrueCrypt is available across platforms
  2. You are dual-booting and not even sharing the partition simultaniously with Win/Ubuntu
    • If you were sharing, it would typically be over network (and the host OS would mount it)
  3. You do not seem to be oriented towards trying to encrypt the boot partitions
    • which can also be done (independently for each OS, if you so desire)

I do this regularly with a removable USB drive.

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problem is what filesystem to choose on the truecrypt volume, ntfs is probably what one want here as FAT32 is just not good enough and ext3(etc) will not work in windows. NTFS in ubuntu should work afaik (unsure if win7 ntfs reqire anything special), but is probably not optimal – Joakim Elofsson Aug 10 '09 at 9:14
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You could use FAT32 or NTFS. Its not really a big problem since you can re-format later if you find the volume is not accessible on one of your systems. Meanwhile, Win2fs (win2fs.sourceforge.net) will let you access Ext2 in Windows. I think there are more solutions these days. – nik Aug 10 '09 at 9:46
I'm picking up this answer as it gets closer, but I may add that none of the ext2 drivers for Windows can work on a TrueCrypted ext3 partition. – J. Pablo Fernández Aug 17 '09 at 11:28
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@Joakim, for the record, can you state which filesystem you have used finally? – nik Aug 17 '09 at 11:30
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up vote 1 down vote

This article talks about what you want: 'Partitioning Windows and Ubuntu'

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up vote 0 down vote

I think it is better to use EXT2 IFS: www.fs-driver.org

I have used it successfully to transfer many TB of data at different times on many systems. It works well the only issue is because it is EXT2 it does not support large inode partitions many ditros now create by default.

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up vote 0 down vote

its supports ext2/3 and just set the inode on the partition to inode 128

sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda# | grep Inode
sudo mke2fs -I 128 -j -t ext3 /dev/sda#    ------    or ext2

where # is the partition number

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