Peter Jason wrote:
On Fri, 29 May 2015 22:45:10 -0400, Paul wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
*******

In summary, a designation of "RAW" may not be correct. That
can also be caused when the USB subsystem doesn't treat the
disk the exact same way as a SATA connection would. In my
case, a storage driver that was not "port agnostic" caused
the problem. The drive did indeed have partitions, but they
remained invisible. And apparently, even the partition table
could not be "seen" by Windows. As a result of this, if you
have valuable data on a drive, and the drive reports RAW,
take your time, change how the drive is connected to the
computer, and try again. Perhaps a direct SATA connection
will be readable.

In a perfect world, a 3TB drive would always be GUID Partition
Table (GPT) prepared. If it were not for the need to be
compatible with Win2K/WinXP, say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

Paul

Thanks. To detail further, I bought this 3TB disk back last October
(2014) and I can't remember if I TrueCrypted it. All the usual
passwords don't work. I don't want to reformat it because I'll lose
data.
Is there any way to determine what encryption software has been used
on a HDD. It's not BitLocker because this would be indicated in
explorer.

I may have stopped installation before the formatting stage because
this takes time for 3TB.

I have put another TrueCrypted into the other USB3 socket and I get
two descriptions in Disk Management:

(1) 3TB HDD: "2794GB RAW, Healthy Primary partition.

(2) TrueCrypted unmounted 30GB Flash drive: "30GB RAW, Healthy
active primary partition.

The only difference is the "active". Is this significant?
Maybe someone else knows the answer to that, as I've never
used TrueCrypt (or Bitlocker).

Obviously, for full disk encryption type products, there
has to be a mechanism to start things up. A small partition
with the boot flag set, sounds like an excellent place for
TrueCrypt to have a decryptor loaded. I don't know if it's
possible to get plaintext from something like that, unless at
least the boot loader is in a plaintext area.

All my other drives work with TrueCrypt with the usual password, so
the fault is probably with the locked-out HDD. Would the
''decryptor'' be somewhere on the HDD, on the platters or on the
control card?

Now, could you have the decryption thing, in a small
partition on one of the other drives ? Maybe that's how
it got broken in the first place. Unplugging the thing
that helps the RAW disk become visible. I don't know
if TrueCrypt works that way or not (can be spread over
multiple disks and still work).

Paul

They make it sound like there is some sort of "boot loader"
on the first track of the disk. (An area sometimes used by
Linux as well, for Grub stage 1.5)

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/root/pd...%201_26_09.pdf

And the picture here, makes it sound like the goods are
stored in the MBR. The MBR is kinda small to hold a
user interface...

http://security.stackexchange.com/qu...authentication

Paul