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I have a 2TB Seagate internal 2.5" disk, and created 2 partitions:
- 100 MB unencrypted partition
- 1800 MB Veracrypt encrypted partition
The partition table on the disk is MBR. I put the internal disk in an ICYBOX with SATA-USB3 converter and hooked it up to a USB3 port in my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad running Windows 8.1).
Whenever I have the Veracrypt partition mounted, it gets dismounted at random intervals. Also, once every so many times I mount the volume, the mounted partition is shown as empty. If I dismount and mount again, the data is again displayed. It is very weird behavior that I didnt see before.
I have triple-checked all possibilities why this might happen: the USB port itself, the connectors, disk integrity check (no bad sectors), even SeaTools to check the health of the disk. All fine.
Perhaps this keeps happening because the disk was formatted with MBR (instead of GPT) partition table. So I will try to convert MBR into GPT using Partition Wizard, which supports this operation in the free version while mantaining the data on the disk.
Question: is it correct to perform this operation on the disk while the Veracrypt partition is not mounted? Also, will the fact that the second partition is encrypted, influence the conversion of the partition table in any way?
As a precaution, I have backed up the Veracrypt volume header.
If the data would get lost that would be extremely unfortunate but not terrible, as I have 2 clones of this disk (with the same issue by the way, as they are physical clones).
Any thought here is most welcome!
Pr0no
Posted 2017-05-16T17:24:43.973
Reputation: 177
Please add what laptop you're using and what OS is running. That will really help. :) – kyle_engineer – 2017-05-16T17:27:29.930
@Ramhound What you talk about concerns a system disk I assume. In my case, it is a data disk. – Pr0no – 2017-05-16T18:57:20.220
@Ramhound As i wrote, the current veracrypt partition keeps getting dismounted randomly, when I'm working on the disk. It is just a matter of time before the disk becomes seriously corrupt. It simply dismounts, even if filehandles are open. It just drops. Veracrypt says this usually happens if the connector is poor, or any other connection issue. But I have checked all that, and am left with a disk with 400'000 files, plm. 1.7TB, and files as big as 20 GB. My last resort is reasoning that MBR is the cause, and switching to GPT will fix my issue... – Pr0no – 2017-05-16T19:08:31.617
@Ramhound -- are you saying that I should decrypt the encrypted partition, so that I can access the data just like that, and then create a new GPT veracrypt disk and copy the data onto that disk? Do you have any assessment how long it will take to decrypt a 1.8TB partition? And what would happen if the mounted partition gets unexpectedly dropped again, while decrypting it -- data corruption? – Pr0no – 2017-05-16T19:10:46.480
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
– Pr0no – 2017-05-16T19:28:28.450