Partially Encrypted Drive causing boot problems
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Hello
I'm new to this encryption thing. My PC has three hdd and my plan was to encrypt all three - Istarted the first and then deferred it and went to bed. This morning the PC won't boot with that partially encrypted drive plugged in, I just get a blank black screen even though that drive is late in the boot order. If I unplug that drive and reboot, everything works normally. Veracrypt gave me no indication there was a problem, I got the successfully deferred message
Any idea what has happened here?
Dan
One possibilty that occurs to me:
When a PC boots, it runs a Power On Self Test' (POST) routine, basically the mainboard's 'Basic Input/Ouput System' (BIOS) software checking that all the hardware connected to the mainboard is working OK.
In the BIOS, it is (usually) possible to configure how to react if POST finds an error eg stop loading on any error, or just on keyboard or monitor problems etc. I wonder if your BIOS is configured in the former way; POST discovers one of your hard drives is 'faulty' (Veracrypt obviously isn't running at this point), and so the BIOS stops loading.
You can normally access the BIOS configuration by pressing a specific key just as the PC starts to boot (Del, or F2, or F10, it'll vary by mainboard vendor). Might be worth a look.
Sounds totally plausible - but I can't find that option anywhere in my BIOS settings. It's MSI's Click 4 BIOS - I've been through all the options as far as I can tell but can't see anything to let me configure how to handle POST hardware failures.
What make/model is your mainboard?