Truecrypt: Encrypt entire drive without having a CD/DVD drive

Question

When I try to encrypt my laptop using TrueCrypt, it wants me to create a rescue disk and verify it. However, the laptop does not have a CD drive or a DVD drive, and I don't own something that can be connected to it. So, how do I proceed?

I guess that a meaningful "rescue disk" would be a bootable USB flash memory, so maybe the solution is to burn the iso onto such one - but how?

Answer 1

If it's Windows, grab Microsoft's Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel. Run it as Administrator, install the driver, add a new virtual drive, and load TrueCrypt's rescue disc image on it. The .iso should be somewhere in %ProgramFiles%\TrueCrypt\

Edit: Virtual CloneDrive appears to support Windows 7 on x64.

This should be enough to trick TrueCrypt's disc check. Once it's done, don't forget to uninstall the Virtual CD driver.

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To boot the rescue disc from a USB drive, you could try these:

• Creating a multiple boot USB stick (includes instructions for TC Rescue Disc)

Answer 2

Normally the Truecrypt Format application needs to verify that you've burned the created rescue disk to a CD/DVD drive, and it won't proceed until it does that.

In order to proceed without burning the rescue disk, you need to start the "Truecrypt Format" with the "/noisocheck" or "/n" flag. After the image is created, you can then save it to any folder on your drive, and later on burn it on a USB-drive, as mention in other posts.

More information: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=command-line-usage

/noisocheck or /n

Do not verify that TrueCrypt Rescue Disks are correctly burned. This can be useful e.g. in corporate environments where it may be more convenient to maintain a central repository of ISO images rather than a repository of CDs or DVDs. WARNING: Never attempt to use this option to facilitate the reuse of a previously created TrueCrypt Rescue Disk. Note that every time you encrypt a system partition/drive, you must create a new TrueCrypt Rescue Disk even if you use the same password. A previously created TrueCrypt Rescue Disk cannot be reused because it was created for a different master key.

Answer 3

Windows 7 64 bit, I ran into the same problem - the command line switch (/n or /noisocheck) simply does not work with Truecrypt 6.3a. I tried the 64 bit and the 32 bit cmd.exe, both failed. The solution was to install the "Daemon Tools Lite" and to mount the rescue.iso once it was created. Truecrypt recognized the "rescue-CD" and continued. But even then after the necessary reboot the harddisk was not encrypted initially, because the automatically started TrueCrypt lacked administrator credentials. I had to end Truecrypt, restart as administrator, then to resume encryption (which will be finished in 7 hours..., I am waiting for the next problems...)