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I bought a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green hard drive. I want to store my files on it but also want to encrypt it so I've downloaded TrueCrypt. However TrueCrypt says that I can't encrypt the entire device as it has partitions - I can encrypt individual partitions though.
If I look in diskpart it only has one partition called Partition 1. I formatted it, still one partition. If I delete that partition in diskpart, then the disk becomes raw and I need to use Disk Management in Windows 7 to create a new simple volume before I can put things on the drive again.
Does an external hard drive need to have partitions? I think in this case it is one partition that takes up 100% of the space. However, doesn't that mean there will be an unencrypted partition table present when I encrypt the partition?
I wanted to be able to claim the drive is second hand and was securely erased if stopped by customs; having a partition table makes that seem less... plausible.
How are you connecting this drive (USB/eSATA)? Did you put it in an external enclosure yourself? I'm currently doing this with an eSATA external drive. on the eSATA drive, partitions outside the TrueCrypt container aren't necessary. – bwall – 2011-09-14T13:19:20.293
it came with an enclosure it uses USB 2.0. – frikadelen – 2011-09-14T13:22:53.687