Kevin Walker - 2019-04-15

I’ve been using VeraCrypt to encrypt a 16Gb USB drive, and the last time I decrypted the drive I got a message saying that the volume header was corrupt, and needed to be restored. The drive seemed to decrypt, but Windows 7 did not recognize it as NTFS or assign a drive letter, so I did a Restore volume header from the backup embedded in the volume. It still did not recognize the filesystem, so I haven’t been able to recover any data from the drive. I’ve tried several undelete/recovery tools, most of which report the correct drive size but cannot recover the partition, so I assume that there are some bad sectors in the filesystem header area. I also was not diligent recently about defragging the data, so that could be an issue.

Restoring the volume header was the only write operation on the drive since the failure; is it possible to try repairing the filesystem headers? Or a better way to attempt to recover the data, since my last backup is fairly old?

Thanks,
K Walker