Truecrypt Your Entire Hard Drive!
Truecrypt can be found here:
Truecrypt is an open-source, free program for everyone.
Download the latest version of Truecrypt.
Open Truecrypt and choose ‘Create Volume’. Choose ‘Encrypt entire hard drive’. Then, you will choose whether you single-boot or multi-boot your machine.
On the encryption options, I just choose AES because it is the default setting, and it’s a very strong encryption.
Next you will choose a password. This option is neat because it actually gives you a small notice saying that a password with less than 20 characters is easier to break than one with more than 20.
On the next page, you must randomize your data. You must move your mouse around in the box of algorithms to create a very randomized clump of data. The more randomized, the better encrypted.
Truecrypt will make your create a rescue disk. This is easy if you have a cd burner already installed in your tower. If not (if you have a netbook), you must create the rescuedisk.iso and burn it onto a flashdrive or something of the like. You are basically making Truecrypt think you have a cd burner and are burning the cd, when instead, you are just sticking the iso on a USB flashdrive.
For my netbook, I used WinCD Emu (http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/). WinCD Emu emulates the burning of a cd, so Truecrypt thinks you’ve finished this task.
Truecrypt will ask you to wipe your drive, and I just choose none since I don’t really need to. Next you must go through a pretest. Your computer will restart and a Truecrype login screen will appear before the windows login (this is why Konboot wouldn’t work!). If everything goes well and the pretest completes with no problems, you can begin encrypting. Encryption takes a LONG time, so be patient! Once it’s done, it’ll prompt you, and you’re finished!
For a more in depth step by step, go here.
And as always, you can email me at snubs@hak5.org!
June 30 2009 09:45 pm | Uncategorized
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
So I have a Dell laptop with TPM on it. It says the hard drive is protected with a hardware chip to prevent it from being used on any other machine. It has a pre-boot screen that uses a fingerprint reader.
My question is: does that mean the hard drive is really protected, or should I still use TrueCrypt on top of this?