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How can we have password-protection on an external hard drive without changing it's format or encoding it?

In previous months I asked this question and every one told me to use truecrypt!
But with truecrypt I had many many problems in Windows 7, and I had to reformat my hard drive!
Is there a simple way for just password protect an external hard drive without changing it's format?

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1 Answer

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If your question is: Can I just password my drive without changing the data? Then the answer is yes you can, but it would be terrible protection as your data is still stored unencrypted.

The only way to secure your data is to change it. I do not know what problems you had with truecrypt, but there are many other tools, including windows encryption, or if you want to (though this is not very elegant) you can just create a passworded rar archive that you keep on updating (or just create many of them).

I feel confident that any problems with truecrypt that you had though were not the fault of truecrypt, and should an issue arise with that, feel free to post a question here about it.

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some months ago i bought an external hard drive for one of my customers and i forgot password-protection about it and i could't re back it / so i installed truecrypt on it / but it seems he can not work with it (amateur user) and every day he calls me about that and some days wants to kill me / however because of some respect i can't tell him this is user's bug , not software...so i am looking for an easy way for just shotting his calls down... – LostLord Aug 10 '11 at 7:17
i really do n't know what is he doing with this software! but i forced to reformat it 3 times with losing data / sometimes when we enter our password , truecrypt goes to thinking mode and can not decode hard drive! this was one of our problems / the other one is about password! sometimes truecrypt can not recognize entered password and tells input password is incorrect! – LostLord Aug 10 '11 at 7:25
but the biggest problem is truecrypt time for making hard drive compatible with it / i really scared about this time (one day or more)! – LostLord Aug 10 '11 at 7:29
@soandos: I think you meant "...as your data is still stored *un*encrypted" at the end of the first paragraph. – Dave Sherohman Aug 10 '11 at 9:27
@Dave, edited, and thanks. – soandos Aug 11 '11 at 20:07

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