So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that “Impression” had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.

Now, the situation:

  • Currently shows up as:
    • 6 MB FAT
    • 4.3 GB
    • 2 TB unallocated
    • 2.6TB unallocated
  • The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
  • Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.

I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

  • mina86@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    32·
    14 hours ago

    VeraCrypt Volume Format Specification:

    Each VeraCrypt volume contains an embedded backup header, located at the end of the volume (see above). The header backup is not a copy of the volume header because it is encrypted with a different header key derived using a different salt (see the section Header Key Derivation, Salt, and Iteration Count).

    It may be possible to recover the encryption key. You might try asking on VeraCrypt forums/mailing lists or contacting a commercial data recovery service which understands VeraCrypt. Though I’m not familiar with VeraCrypt so I may be misunderstanding the cited documentation.