Use TrueCrypt’s System Encryption Without Optical Drive



TrueCrypt is the tool of choice to encrypt your computer hard drives, and under windows it offers the option to encrypt the system drive on the fly, which is very comfortable. As you might guess, this could also go terribly wrong, which is why TrueCrypt forces you to create a rescue disk ISO, which has saved me a lot of trouble in the past. However, by default, TrueCrypt does not let you encrypt your system drive before you have actually burned that image to a real CD, and that, on the other hand, is quite annoying in a day and age where many notebooks no longer have an optical drive. What few people know - this check can be turned off by executing
"TrueCrypt Format.exe" /noisocheck
If you don't believe me, try it yourself or check out their documentation.

2 Replies to “Use TrueCrypt’s System Encryption Without Optical Drive”

  1. What happens when you need that recovery disk that you did not create? Sure, you have an ISO image on disk but you need to burn that to a bootable thumb drive. Good luck in finding workable software to do that.
  2. Booting from a USB stick has never been a problem for me. Actually, we have a blag post about how to create a bootable USB stick in Windows, not using any additional software =D.

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