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Want to know what happen to:

  1. Bitlocker partition
  2. Veracrypt partition
  3. Veracrypt container

If there's bad sector appear in the encryption area.

Can I still mount/open the encryption to save non-corrupted data inside it?

OR

I cant open it at all and good bye?

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    For Veracrypt, you might consider this question: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/128197/how-robust-is-a-veracrypt-container-against-disk-errors-bit-rot?rq=1 Plus, you might be better off to decide on a suitable file system instead, which addresses this problem at the lower level. BTRFS is a candidate. – Marcel Apr 14 '22 at 11:22

1 Answers1

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If the bad block appears in the area of the drive where the encrypted fie data is saved then there will be no big damage. Because hard disks do allow to read a random sector, encryption software like VeraCrypt and Bitlocker can not encrypt whole files or even the whole drive as a whole.

Instead they encrypt the partition block-wise (usually 4 KiB), so every block is encrypted using it's own encryption key (usually derived from the block address and the used master encryption key).

If now one bad sector makes the data unreadable only one of the encryption blocks may not be (fully) be decryptable.

But there are more sensitive areas: Bitlocker and VeraCrypt maintain a section that contains the encrypted master encryption key. For data safety purposes this section is written at least two times, usually at the beginning and at the end of the encrypted partition/image. But if there would be a bad sector destroying both of them then all encrypted data would be undecryptable.

Robert
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    For veracrypt, I know we can make backup of the header. So we can restore it if the header corrupted. But how about bitlocker? –  Apr 14 '22 at 16:35