Corrupt files after successful mount on some systems
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Hi,
I created an encrypted USB memory stick on a Windows 7, 64-bit system. I can dismount and remount it and read the contents.
Having moved this to a Windows 10, 64-bit system I can mount the device successfully and the file system is visible and as expected, but all of the files are corrupt - a simple text file now shows garbage, but there are no errors reported on accessing the file, so this seems to be a problem with the decryption. I have tried multiple files of multiple formats (PDF, docx, xlsx, etc) and all fail to open. I tried a different Windows 10 system from a different vendor, and have the same issue. The volume mounts, shows AES as the auto-detected encryption algorithm, and shows the correct filesystem contents, but all file content is wrong.
Going back to the source Windows 7 system, the file contents are perfect.
Any ideas what is happening here? All systems are patched, and Veracrypt 1.23 hotfix 2 is in use on all systems.
Have no idea what is going on as I am not a power user.
But anyhow, in Windows 7, after mounting the USB drive, right-click the drive letter in the VeraCrypt user interface and select Check Filesystem. Maybe it will give something to work on. Do the same in Windows 10.
In Win 7, after mounting the USB drive, I would copy all the files (unencrypted) to some other external drive until you figure out what's what. Of course, you need to be mindfull of security until you encrypt it again.
This turned out to be a problem with the Windows 7 system, which had Dell Data Protection Enterprise installed on it. When the drive was encrypted, it was mounted as a Windows drive on F: and could be read normally - right up to the point where the corporate policy said "Oh look, a new disk drive, we need to encrypt that" and silently encrypted the contents of the drive. While the drive was mounted on the system which encrypted it, it was readable. When it was removed and re-mounted on a different system which did not have DDPE, the file system could be viewed but of course the DDPE-encrypted contents were unreadable.
The solution was to mount the USB drive as a removable device, which the corporate policy decided should not be encrypted by default.