Deleted an encrypted partition in windows 7. Anyone to undo the deletion?

Question

I had a virus on my windows 7 laptop and had to reinstall windows 7. I had a seperate partition (D:) that I had encrypted with truecrypt and I had it set up where the partition wouldn't immediately show. Foolishly, I went to disk properties and deleted the volume. Now I only have the one partion (C:) which is 100Gb of a 640gb drive. Is there any way to undo this? Can I recreate a partition on there and will true crypt recognize it? Am I screwed?

Answer 1

If you recreate the partition starting and ending at exactly the same positions as before, and you know the keys for it of course, truecrypt should be able to read it as before.

Removing a partition does not overwrite any of its original content (unless you create new partitions over the same space afterwards and write to them, of course), and creating a new partition does not affect the data space, so if you create it in the right place truecrypt won't notice it was ever gone.

Answer 2

Partition utilities like the one from Arconis can search for and undelete deleted partitions. Some of the open source/freeware equivalents may also have similar capabilities.

As for the encryption portion, that is most likely dependent of where the encryption keys are stored. If the keys have been lost, then you might not have too many options from there.

Answer 3

Try TestDisk, if the partition has not been overwritten, it should be able to recover it.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk