veracrypt full disk encryption bootloader
Open source disk encryption with strong security for the Paranoid
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ok so here it is. dont bury me under the jail for my screw up, just looking for help.
i did a full disk encryption on a windows 10 hp laptop a few months ago.
i must of skipped where it asked about making a rescue disk or i just didnt see or notice it.
after a few times usng the laptop the veracrypt bootloader stopped working and now it boots windows.
as soon as i turn it on it goes into diagnstic repairs to fix the problem (windows does)
than it goes to shut down pc or advanced options.
what if anything can i do to get the vera bootloader to work? is it still on the pc just not booting first?
can i go into bios and change the order if so? if not is there anything that i can do to get into my pc?
have a few years of data on there id rather not lose if possible.
any help is greatly apperciated and if this has been posted before i appoligize for posting again. i just didnt come across it
You can remove the OS drive and install it as a secondary drive in other PC with VeraCrypt software installed.
Then attempt to mount the system drive using the option "Mount Without Pre-Boot Authentication". Once mounted, copy off your data.
Search for the ISO file. It is possible that you saved the Rescue Disk ISO file which would allow you to create the Rescue Disk from the ISO file using the other PC. Then reinstall OS drive back on the original computer and use the Rescue Disk to decrypt the system drive.
That is the problem I just had. I've been using the EFI bootloader for months, and the loader just vanished into thin air. I did connect another hard drive to the computer first, and then reconnect the original hard drive to my computer immediately before the vanishing. That seems to have triggered the event. It seems to me that the bootloader wasn't installed to the disk, or it wouldn't have vanished. Bytes don't fall out of disks like dust when you move them around.
I said in another post that the bootloader requested a password while the disk was connected to another computer. I later realized that my EFI loader could not have been running. Instead it must have been the MBR loader that I was using before an EFI loader was released.
I think Veracrypt should be developed with more attention to making backup and recovery easy. It does'nt have to be as much of a P.I.T.A. as it is. I cloned my drive's partitions to make a backup before the bootloader incident and found out that the partitions in the clone are unmountable. I am thinking that the encryption keys must be stored outside the volume in unpartitioned space because my system disk was mountable after the bootloader incident while my clone was not mountable. I think that the bootloader was installed in the weird cyberspace of the computer's motherboard. I don't know how to back up and restore motherboards. I back up and restore hard drives. Every variable that is needed for decrypting a Veracrypt partition should be inside the encrypted partition, with the exception of the passphrase and/or keyfile. The software should offer to decrypt any partition, including a system partition, that is not hosting the live OS.