Periods Makesense - 2018-04-19

Background:

I've been using an external HDD to do some Acronis system backups. The HDD was encrypted with VeraCrypt, and I had no issue with this setup.

I then needed to restore a previous version of the backup, and I realize that as long as the HDD was encrypted, I couldn't - when you restore on the same machine, Acronis restarts in a "rescue mode" that is basically a Win PE instance . But because Veracrypt doesn't run, I couldn't decrypt the HDD, and subsequently, couldn't restore the system.

So I proceeded to permanently decrypt the HDD using veracrypt - just selected the permanently decrypt option then selected the external HDD. Two days later, the process finished. I restarted the computer, but not only the HDD was still managed by Veracrypt (I had to enter the password), but the password didn't work.

At first I was using 1.21, and the error I got was the infamous MountVolume:8030.

I then tried a couple of workarounds that I found around these forums, including trying to mount with a backup header and enabling AUTOMOUNT via diskpart - all to no avail.

I then upgraded to 1.22 and the error I get now is: MountVolume:8090

Any idea what I can do to fix it?

Other details - OS is Win7 SP1/64bit. I have no other OSes on the machine. I do have Secure Boot enabled. even though I don't think that'd make any difference, since the partition I'm trying to decrypt is a normal one, not a system partition.

Many thanks.