David A. Rousseau - 2017-09-13

Veracrypt Version: 1.21. In-place partition encryption of external HDD.

Tried encrypting a 2TB WD My Passport Ultra using AES(Serpent). Encryption halted at around 4.3% suggesting hardware malfunctions / issues. Read that WD's Passports can have issues due to onboard encryption (supposedly). Current Error reads "The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error. Source: ResumeInPlaceEncWaitThreadProc:341". After that message, the next reads "VeraCrypt has not found any volume where the process of encryption/decryption of a non-system volume has been interrupted and where the volume header can be deciphered using the supplied password and/or keyfile(s)". Password used to work to fruitlessly 'continue' encryption - so the password is correct. Drive is now unmountable in Veracrypt even using the backup header option and cannot be opened by Windows.

I'm familiar with the game - drive might be dead & unrecoverable. I checked the fitness of the drive and it seemed fine ahead of encryption. I cannot confirm this is now the case in its current state. I made backups of my data before starting the process, however, I missed one single file in an obscure folder. That's the only thing keeping me from formatting and trying again.

Any suggestions to further the encryption of the drive or any third party tools that can be used to recover a file from a partially encrypted drive?