TrueCrypt royal screw up

Ok I messed up bad and effectively just lost all of my data, overall question is can I get it back?

So I backed up all my data to a USB external hard drive which is encrypted with TrueCrypt prior to a Win7 reinstall. Then I reinstalled Win7.

Then I opened Windows Disk Management in the new Win7 to redo my partitions. My unmounted TrueCrypt drive is still plugged in. And Disk Management popped up with a window asking if I wanted to set a Master Boot Record for Disk 1. Stupidly, I said yes, and it wrote a MBR to my unmounted TrueCrypt drive, which effectively rendered it useless.

My question is can I undo that MBR that got written to my external drive and screwed up the TrueCrypt volume on there?

Thanks.

 

Wow ok. After about 3 hours of panicking and searching for a good data recovery program, I came across a post in the TrueCrypt forums saying that there is an embedded backup header on all TC volumes. So, sure enough, I was able to access that, which then replaced the header that the MBR had overwritten, and I've got all my data back!

Talk about a close call.

 

wow good to know, where did you find this backup header?

 

It's at the physical end of the drive on all encrypted volumes. Basically, you just need to select the device like you are going to mount it, and then click Tools > Restore Volume Header and hope it is able to find this backup.

If you did like I did, which was basically a quick format (this stupid MBR overwrote the partition table, which is where the primary header is on a TC drive, the first physical 512 bytes), you can still salvage this backup header, like I said, at the physical end of the drive.

I learned a lot about hard drives last night lol...

 

Thanks for the info, I'm just setting up TC this will help a ton!

 

I would recommend reading the FAQs and the forums on TC also if this is your first time setting encryption up; and start small too--don't encrypt all of your data on the first try, because if you mess something up, it's gone.

 

Nice save! I think I would crap my pants in if that happened to me.

 

Haha, just remember that if something like this ever happens to you, immediately stop and disconnect the drive to avoid any data being written to it. Then research and try to figure out how to fix it. That's what I did and was able to save everything.