[plug] encyption - WARNING on TrueCrypt

[Steve Boak]

On Monday 06 November 2006 12:16, Shayne O'Neill wrote:
> He should check out Truecrypt (I think theres a linux version too). Lets
> you create an encripted virtual drive (which can be a drive, or just a
> single (say) 4gig file that unpacks to a drive. Its good stuff.

As it happens, last week I set up a trial TrueCtypt volume on two XP 
computers, a desktop and a laptop, and everything worked as expected.

However, I have just done the same under Windows-2000 on a new external USB2 
IDE drive this morning on my main (dual boot Debian/Windows) machine and 
disaster has struck in a big way!!!

The volume creation seemed to work OK under Windows-2000, and I proceeded to 
copy files from an older USB2 IDE drive to the new encrypted volume on the 
new drive. The copy (appears to have) finished, then Windows spontaneously 
crashed and did a hard reboot. 

Now the partition table of the main system hard drive (which was not involved 
in the file transfer) seems to be corrupted in a big way, and neither Debian 
or Windows will boot. The Win2000 install disk can't see an existing Win2000 
partition any more, but that didn't really surprise me :-)

What did surprise me, is that the Debian root partition also seems to be in a 
bad way. I expected to just fix the boot sector, and all would be well again. 
Not so!  I've run up Knoppix and I'm doing an fsck on the Debian root 
partition at the moment, it's taking an age, and it looks totally trashed!!

Anyone else had experience (good or bad) with TrueCrypt?

Steve

> NTFS *should* allow encrypting and then putting a ACL over a file, if he
> wishes.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
> Behalf Of Alex Polglaze
> Sent: Monday, 6 November 2006 11:29 AM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: [plug] encyption
>
> G'day All,
>
> Here's the question.
>
> I was at a mates place on the weekend, he runs XP, I run Linux.
>
> He asked me could I encrypt a single file on my system to prevent
> unauthorised access. I wasn't sure, but I said that I would find out.
>
> But it did get me thinking.
>
> Can you do it under Linux or XP for that matter.
>
> Alternatively, can you encrypt a whole folder, (windows term) with the
> same effect.
>
> TIA
>
>
> Alex

-- 
Steve Boak, (08) 9756 0662, P.O. Box 240, Nannup, WA 6275
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