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I am trying to obtain data from my previous laptop which is broken. Part of the data was not backed up at the time the laptop broke down.

The hard drive is still functioning properly and I can access it via a USB connector on another laptop.

The drive is encrypted using truecrypt and contains an encrypted system partition (C:) and another encrypted partition (D:) which auto mounted on startup. The relevant data is on the D:\ partition. Windows 7 was installed on the broken laptop.

I have tried the following:

  1. Install truecrypt on new laptop and access the drive from there. I can only see the system partition and after mounting I can access the data there. I cannot see the D:\ partition though.

  2. Tried to boot from the hard drive using the new laptop. I have changed the boot settings such that legacy support is enabled and I have put the boot option USB diskette on key at the top of the list. Unfortunately the laptop keeps booting the original Windows 8.

I have not been able to find a good approach on the internet using google: does anyone know how to proceed in this case?

Thank you for your answer, if you need additional information please let me know.

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  • For clarity - did you have the drive split and partitioned into C: and D: partitions and then Truecrypt encrypted one and then the other? - or - Did you create an encrypted C: drive, boot and create a Truecrypt drive within it (which would have shown up as a new drive letter D:) - or - Did you create plausible deniable sub drive within the C: drive? May 9, 2015 at 21:50
  • FYI, if you're interested in trying to use Linux to read the data, (maybe booting from a dvd/USB) there are truecrypt versions for linux (last 7.2 original read-only version here ), and cryptsetup should be able to read truecrypt containers too. See wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TrueCrypt or mounting TrueCrypt volumes in GNU/Linux using cryptsetup
    – Xen2050
    May 10, 2015 at 0:06
  • @Blackbeagle: I first encrypted D: and afterwards encrypted my system partition. May 10, 2015 at 7:07
  • @Xen2050: I have no experience using Linux but if your approach has a good chance of success I am prepared to do the effort and get to know Linux. Why do you think truecrypt in Linux will be able to open the D: drive while truecrypt for Windows cannot? May 10, 2015 at 7:17
  • @BartPeters Well, if it didn't work in Windows, then trying Linux is at least worth a try, the worst that can happen is it won't work again, and having a bootable Linux DVD/USB for emergencies couldn't hurt. I've had very good luck using Linux (Mint, Ubuntu) to read from non-booting and failing hard drives, mounting them read-only is easy (mount -o ro ...) and I'm not even sure if/how Windows can do that. But the encryption is an added challenge, it makes backup copies a LOT more important... something could have overwritten the data on your drive, so it may not be recoverable at all
    – Xen2050
    Jun 17, 2015 at 22:16

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