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I have Windows 8.1 with TrueCrypt 7.1a. I have encrypted the whole of my secondary drive. The "Optimise Drives" dialog reports the media type as "unknown" and the current status reports as "Optimisation not available".

My backup drive which is USB-connected but similarly encrypted behaves the same way. My primary drive is also encrypted but in this case Windows reports the type as "Hard disk drive" and the status is "OK"

To be honest I've never tried to defrag a truecrypted drive before, but the documentation says it should work.

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  • I'm not familliar with an optimization feature in truecrypt. are you using a win8 feature to try to optimize? if so, I'd give it up as a wash, since it appears to be attempting to read the drive in a way that doesn't pass through the truecrypt driver, and thus can't see the real volume. Yes, a volume Defrag should work. no idea if that covers the sum-total of the optimization feature's actions. if you have a link to a description of the feature of which you speak, that may help us poor troglodytes that won't touch win8. Dec 23, 2013 at 14:34
  • I'm trying to use the windows 8 optimization (aka defrag) feature - windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/…. The truecrypt documentation says truecrypt is compatible with defrag applications. I've just tried the USB drive with Windows 7 using the same version of truecrypt and it works OK, so it's presumably a windows 8 thing. Incidentally both drives are proper disks, not SSD.
    – Andy
    Dec 23, 2013 at 15:44
  • I'd try a third party defragger like defraggler, which should focus on the volume, not the partition. Dec 23, 2013 at 15:52
  • See also: superuser.com/questions/593356/…
    – Andrew
    Nov 1, 2017 at 6:46

1 Answer 1

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By trial and error I found a solution (if not an explanation). Simply run the command-line version of defrag and all works fine.

Interestingly the "optimize drives" dialog correctly shows the status and progress of the command-line defrag while it's running. once it's finished, it goes back to "Optimisation not available" again.

Just another piece of Windows 8 crapness I guess :-(

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    You have to run the command prompt as administrator then type defrag x: (where x is the drive letter to optimize).
    – AlexV
    May 9, 2014 at 20:00
  • I have the same issue with VeraCrypt on Windows 8.1. In case of an underlying SSD, use defrag x: /L (x: is the mounted drive, /L for to "Perform retrim on the specified volumes"). Hope that helps some other people.
    – dnegel
    Jan 25, 2019 at 21:28
  • Can you try this command in Windows command ? winsat formal . Now launch Powershell as Admonistrator and try this one : Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter c -ReTrim -Verbose
    – djibe
    May 4, 2020 at 21:10

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