#86 Full decryption working fine with Windows Repair USB plugged-in

[Jade Sambrook]

My 500GB sdd hard drive is encrypted with VeraCrypt. The other day my PC froze except for the mouse cursor. So I restarted the PC but then the VeraCrypt bootloader was no longer present. Instead it was an error screen telling me that hardware/software had been changed and that Windows could no longer start because certain hardware was unavailable. I therefore used the VeraCrypt rescue disk to restore the VeraCrypt bootloader. After it was restored it would always say that my password was incorrect, so I used the VeraCrypt rescue disk to restore the key data. I was then able to get past the bootloader with my password, to a blue screen telling me that Windows needs to be repaired. I therefore inserted the windows repair cd but nothing happens, even if I press on 'Enter' or 'F8'. It just stays stuck at that blue screen.

So I attempted to fully decrypt the drive using the rescue disk, but it found a bad sector and the decryption process is so slow (as in it would take well over 10 days to decrypt the drive).

I therefore decided to connect the drive to another operating system and attempt to use the VeraCrypt software to do the decryption. But it always says "partition not found". Now to be clear, I can see the drive in Windows Disk Management, but it says "unallocated" and is aksing me to initialize the disk which I dont want to do so as to not wipe the data that is on it.

Do note that I tried running VeraCrypt with admin privileges, and that I selected in the mount options something like "read only", "use embeded backup header" and "mount without bootloader". Regardless, I still get a message that says "no partition found" when I try and mount the drive.

So I decided that I would have to accept to decrypt the drive using the rescue disk and that I would simply have to wait 10 days or more. However, and this is the most important part of this entire ticket, this time I inadvertently left a USB key plugged in that has the Windows repair disk on it, and when I selected 'Permanently decrypt system' with the VeraCrypt rescue disk it did not find any errors this time and started decrypting the drive much faster (as in it would only take 1.5 days to decrypt instead of 10+ days).

Then out of curiosity I pulled the USB key out while the drive was decrypting and it stopped decrypting to tell me that it had found errors and asking me whether to skip or not.

So I plugged the USB key back in and restarted the decryption process.

Is this okay? Will it still decrypt my drive properly? Or should I let it find the errors and wait 10+ days for it to decrypt?

Are there any other solutions or advice you could offer to help at least get data off this drive that has made my life a living hell?

Thanks!:)