Elizabeth Vogue - 2023-11-16

Due to my main laptop with an HDD breaking down, I now have to use my secondary laptop which is quite old.

I encrypted it back in 2019, and did not know much about encryption at the time, so I just went for a full disk encryption and only encrypted the C drive (which is the only drive it has).

Now that I am back on this laptop, I can see that it has an SDD (SD8SN8U- 256 GB 1006)

I also found out that my current version of windows is 1903. I have tried updating to 22H2 over 20 times in the past week, but ALWAYS ran into the following error:

0xC1900101-0x20017
The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during BOOT operation

This seems to be an issue with the bootloader preventing Windows from updating, so I have no choice but to decrypt the entire SSD and then rencrypt.

Due to overprovisioning, I do not know how to do this without data leakage. I do not know how to properly encrypt my SSD now that data has been written on it. I do not know if I encrypted my SSD back in 2019 BEFORE or AFTER data was written on it.

My threat level isn't a three letter agency, let's say it's police. So mid level.

How do I decrypt the SSD then properly encrypt it to prevent forensic analysis from retrieving sensitive information?

I do not have the budget to buy another SSD or laptop at the moment. I would do that if I could, believe me.