Accidentally re-initialized encrypted drive and now can't mount

[Piit Jar]

Hi people. Hoping for some help here!

Been using Truecrypt for many many years, now bought a new hard drive and swapped to Veracrypt.

I created an encrypted non-system drive on the new 10TB hard drive. GPT, NTFS, one roughly 9TB partition on whole disk. Mounted the volume fine and moved data on it (yes moved...)

This morning went to open disk management, got a message "You must initialize disk before logical disk manager can access it". Without having my brain turned on, checked that GTP was checked, clicked OK and then got that big DOH feeling! :(

Now I can't mount disk on Veracrypt anymore. On disk management drive is showing as Online and completely unallocated.

Needless to say, I did not create any recovery disks with Veracrypt. :( Now I have a feeling I might have screwed up big time.. Don't want to mess this any more so I'm kindly asking for help before trying any data recovery software or something. Is there any way to regain access to the disk?

Many thanks!

[Enigma2Illusion]

First, you need to clone this drive so you can perform the following steps in the link below on the cloned drive. This allows you to make multiple recovery attempts using different methods without impacting the orginial drive that has your data.

https://sourceforge.net/p/veracrypt/discussion/technical/thread/e99fe5b467/#8cd0

[Piit Jar]

Hello friend! Many thanks for your help!

I went on and tried the restore volume header as in your instructions and voilá everything works! :)

Please just a couple further questions:

With the volume headers restored, is this encrypted drive OK to use in the long run or should I reformat and start over?

Why did the "You need to initialize disk" pop up in disk management? Is there anything I can do to disable that from happening again? I'm guessing it has something to do with the GPT filesystem I chose since my old encrypted drive is MBR and showing as RAW.

I'm very happy here, thank you so much! :)

[Enigma2Illusion]

With the volume headers restored, is this encrypted drive OK to use in the long run or should I reformat and start over?

In my opinion, no need to start over.

Why did the "You need to initialize disk" pop up in disk management? Is there anything I can do to disable that from happening again? I'm guessing it has something to do with the GPT filesystem I chose since my old encrypted drive is MBR and showing as RAW.

I use GPT without being prompted to format the volume.

The common causes of this message is when either:

• Windows drive letter has been assigned to the dismounted VeraCrypt volume.
• You do not have a Windows partition on the drive. You mount by selecting Harddisk N: instead of \Device\HarddiskN\Partition1 where N is the hard disk number.

.
I am glad you were able to easily access the volume and data again.