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I have an external hard drive (no system files on it) which has been encrypted using truecrypt.

Suddenly today when i tried to mount the hard drive, I got the following error:

Incorrect password or not a truecrypt volume

So I tried to mount it using mount options and choosing use backup embedded headers embedded in volume if available option. When I do that the hard drive mounts but I am not able to access any files in the drive.

I get the following error when I click on the drive to open it:

You need to format the disk drive in J: before using it

How do I recover my files? This is very important and urgent. Your help will be greatly appreciated

PS: I am using windows 7 64bit

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  • What OS? I think that although your encryption is OK (because it mounts successfully) the problem may be a corrupted partition. With the disk decrypted you can try running some recovery software... This may not work because the underlying data is encrypted. Worth a shotbit I wouldn't hold my hopes up. Backup is essential with encrypted media.
    – Kinnectus
    Jul 4, 2014 at 6:58
  • @BigChris I am using windows 7 64bit. Just to clarify you are suggesting recovering encrypted data using a thrid party data recovery tool and then using truecrypt again to mount and decrypt it ?
    – sukhvir
    Jul 4, 2014 at 7:02
  • I'm suggesting the other way round... decrypt disk then try recover
    – Kinnectus
    Jul 4, 2014 at 7:55

1 Answer 1

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Use ddrescue or similar to pull the unlocked partition out to another disk, so you aren't at risk of messing up your master backup any further. Perhaps daemontools or something like that will let you attach the image as a disk. Then use various tools to repair the filesystem. If you cant repair it, there are tools like undelete360, magicrescue, foremost, sleuthkit. Pulling the image will be much easier from a livecd such as kali or systemrescuecd (kali has truecrypt).

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