Simon - 2021-11-02

Hello,

I have a technical problem.

I have encrypted a Windows 10 system partition. One day, when booting the laptop, it says: No bootable device found.

It seems that the SSD is defective (see CrystalDiskInfo.png).

To be safe, I cloned the SSD and did all the steps so far on a cloned SSD.

I have connected the SSD to another Windows10 laptop and mounted it successfully. But Windows reports that it can't access the device. So I googled and tried chkdsk /f, but after running it once, I still couldn't access it. Running it again did not solve the problem.

I tried using testDisk, but it didn't work or I wasn't using it correctly.

So I connected the device to a Linux machine. Another error comes up (see VeracryptError.png). I wanted to run testDisk on Linux (I found some information on Google, it would make a difference), but after mounting it shows an error and immediately aborts the connection.

Unfortunately I haven't found the rescue disk yet, but I'm still looking. I thought I could create a new one, but Veraycrypt says it didn't find any encrypted Windows when I try to create one on the unencrypted Windows. I encrypted the Windows and created a rescue disk. But I suspect this rescue disk is only for the freshly encrypted Windows. So my plan was to take a look at the Veracrypt boot partition and the rescue disk. So I connected the SSD to the Linux machine and mounted the Veracrypt partition. It looks very interesting, but I didn't understand anything. The next plan was to take a look at the rescue disk, but it seems that the CD (1.8MB) seems to be empty. I tried various tools and got something like a folder tree of files. I tried matching the boot partition with the rescue disk file tree, but there were no matches. Do I need to boot into the encrypted partition to create a rescue disk?

I would like to try to decrypt the entire partition with the rescue disk.

Thank you very much for your support.

With kind regards

Simon

 
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CrystalDiskInfo.png
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VeracryptError.png