Encrypting a cloned system external disk

[Mr Darren Hibbert]

Hi.

My question is -

I bought an SSD and cloned the original drive to it. Installed the SSD and put the original drive somewhere safe.

Later I encrypted the entire SSD with Veracrypt and was successful.

I now want to encrypt the drive I took out with the files in place but be able to put it back in my laptop should something happen to the SSD.

Any ideas how?

After encryption, if I put the old drive back in, will it just ask for the password?

Thanks.

[RealTehreal]

I assume, you encrypted the device with Windows' system partition on it? In this case, I would swap the devices, encrypt, swap again, done.

Greets

[Mr Darren Hibbert]

Good idea. 😊

[Enigma2Illusion]

Create/capture a new VeraCrypt Rescue Disk for the old drive during the encryption process since the header key and encryption key will be different from the keys used on the SSD.

[Mr Darren Hibbert]

Even if i use the exact same password?

[Enigma2Illusion]

Correct. Each VeraCrypt volume has its own unique header key (hash of the password) and encryption key used to decrypt/encrypt the read/writes to disk.