Blah - 2017-03-06

Have I lost my Win10 installation? Here's a rundown of what I did:

I have an Acer Switch Alpha 12 running Win10 Home.

  • I followed this tutorial. "Encrypt the whole drive" was greyed out so I went with "Encrypt the Windows system partition".
  • Proceeded through tutorial, created rescue disk, but then the "System Encryption Pretest" failed. Disabled "Secure Boot" in the BIOS and was able to pass the Pretest.
  • Encrypted with no problems.
  • Reboot failed: Windows 10 ran its auto recovery (with the Acer logo).
  • Used auto recovery options to select the UEFI USB rescue disk and booted the Veracrypt bootloader from it. Booted into Win10 with no problem.
  • Further googling showed that Acer has some non-standard behavior (link misbehaving) sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/5b859040/#2757 preventing persistent bootloader changes. Decide it's not worth the headache.
  • Boot to rescue disk and run "Decrypt OS". (Now realize that could have been done from Windows)
  • Decrypt successful (I think? Here's a screenshot)
  • Reboot and... oh no! Win 10 auto recovery again? (This time with Windows logo, not Acer logo?) Recovery fails, none of the options seem to help.
  • Boot to Rescue Disk and try to boot from Veracrypt Bootloader. Fails to Win10 auto recovery.
  • Got to windows command prompt from Win10 auto recovery. Try to change to C: drive but it's "The volume does not contain a recognized file system". Think my drive is still encrypted maybe? Confused at this point.
  • Boot to Rescue Disk and try "Restore OS header keys" and "Restore Veracrypt loader binaries to system disk". No change, still running auto recovery.
  • Boot to Rescue Disk and run "Decrypt OS" again (Did running this a second time screw up the data?). Runs same as before. Still unable to boot into Win10 after.

At this point windows auto recovery is still able to finish and give me its recovery options.

Per this thread it turns out 1.19 recovery disk "Decrypt OS" has problems. I apply the patch and try "Decrypt OS" again.

Now it's worse, windows auto recovery won't even complete, now I can't even reinstall windows and start over from scratch.

Am I screwed? Can I recover my ability to boot Win10? Is my data gone? I've tried a testdisk from a live linux disto and it can't read anything from the filesystem. I don't have any hair left to pull out.

 

Last edit: Blah 2017-03-06