
Now You: How do you handle encrypted partitions on your computer? I suggest you back up the drive before you run any operations on it to avoid data loss.

What some suggest you do in that case is to use diskpart to change the partition ID of the drive in question. Removing the drive letter may not be sufficient in some cases. It is only available for the session.Ī bit of discussion is going on over at Superuser about the topic. This prevents accidental access and formatting of the drive in Explorer.Ī drive letter is assigned to the drive when you mount it using the encryption software, but that is only assigned temporarily. You will notice that the drive is no longer listed in Explorer once you remove the drive letter. This removes the drive letter from the drive.

Use the shortcut Windows-R to open the run box.Note that another drive letter may be assigned to the drive when you mount it. This won't touch the data on the drive, and it is still possible to mount the drive using the encryption software.

There are several workarounds for the issue, but the one that worked best for me was to remove the drive letter of the encrypted drive. Unmounted encrypted drives, using software such as TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt or other encryption programs, look to Windows just like new drives that need to be formatted so that they can be put to use by the user of the device.Īccidentally hitting format disk in this case would kill all data on the disk, and that is better avoided.Ī click on cancel displays another prompt stating that the drive is not accessible, and that Windows did not find a recognized file system on the drive. While that is a good thing if the drive is new and you want to start using it, it is not such a good thing if you have encrypted the drive.
