DCPP - DriveCrypt Plus Pack - Problems mounting partitions

[tim555]

A real saga of problems here guys, and perhaps someone from the Securstar
team like Shaun can help. Its almost as if I have a sophisticated virus
which is playing mind games with me, you will see what I mean. No
consipiracy theory but all my problems started after a period when I
installed "Yahoo Desktop Search" engine (beta version), keeping the index
on on of my encrypted volumes (in an encrypted partiton).

Overall h/w, s/w env:

M/c: Toshiba laptop (pentium 4 2GHz, 512MB RAM)
OS : Win2000 Pro SP4, english version

DCPP v2.0 (yes i know, i was one of the earlier uptakers of this
excellent s/w)

HDD-1: 2.5" IBM/Hitachi Travelstar, 60GB, Has following partitions:
1st - is a DCCP enc. volume of around 5GB and formatted with FAT32.
2nd - is a FAT32 partition with the Win2000 OS and is bootable.
~8GB/FAT32
3rd - is a FAT32 partition without any OS or encryption, ~8GB/FAT32
4rd - is a DCCP enc. volume of around 5GB and formatted with FAT32.
5th - is a DCCP enc. volume of around 20GB and formatted with FAT32.
6th - is a DCCP enc. volume of around 7GB and formatted with FAT32.

HDD-1 is used as the main drive in the master drive channel bay.


HDD-2: 2.5" IBM/Hitachi Travelstar, 80GB with first partition of around
10GB not ecrypted and in fact now I have deleted it so blank space.
Second partition is a DCCP enc. volume of around 65GB and formatted with
FAT32.

HDD-2 is used as the slave drive in the second bay (removable caddy,
standard "Toshiba Style Bay")

HDD-3: 2.5" IBM/Hitachi Travelstar, 30GB with fist 7GB unallocated,
followed by 3 DCCP encrypted FAT32 formatted partitions of sizes 2.5GB,
4.5GB, 21GB respectively.

HDD-3 used as extra storage and usually connected via an external USB2.0
caddy.

I also have a couple of external 2.5" and 3.5" USB2.0 disk cases which
enable me to connected external HDDs to my Toshiba.

Disk partitioning s/w: Acronis PartitionExpert 2003 (build 282)

1. A few weeks ago for for some unexplicable reason the m/c hung and
when I rebooted, I could not access the DCCP encrypted partitions on HDD-3
which I normally accessed via the USB external drive caddy. I get the
normal error when I try to mount the drive with DCPP (The disk in drive N
is not fomatted. Do you want to format it now, replace N with other drive
letters for other partitions). So I tried other HDDs with DCCP encrypted
partitions on my 2.5" and 2.5" external USB caddies with the same error!

So I have no idea why I am getting this, even though if I place that disk
in the main primary drive channel of the notebook, I can mount the
partitions.

Q1 - Does anyone have a clue as to why all of a sudden after months of
working fine, my USB connected drives can no longer be mounted?


2. Around 10 days ago, my windows env locked (I had left Yahoo Desktop
Search running, I remember) so I had to do a hard reboot. When I switched
the notebook on, disaster! I could not enter the BIOS password. Normally
when you type there are asterisks in the tiny display pannel indicating
keys have been typed. So after a lot of messing around, I discovered
that
the Toshiba Style Bay channel seems to be experiencing hardware problems
and if I remove it from the notebook, I can enter the BIOS password and
boot from primary HDD bay.

Irrespective of which HDD I try in the Toshiba Style Bay, I get the same
problem. I downloaded the latest available BIOS upgrade for my notebook
but the problem is the same.

Q2 - Has anyone got an idea if this is a hardware problem or a BIOS tweak
etc.


3. The saga continues... So now I have no USB support for DCPP volumes,
no access to my second drive bay and I was trying to fix the latter
problem. I could boot my windows env and access the encrypted volumes on
HDD-1. I used PartitionExpert to see if the partitions could be
recognised on HDD-1,-2 and -3 by placing them in the primary bay one at a
time and running PartionExpert from DOS. In all cases it recognised the
partitions. So farpromising.


So after a few days of working on this, I was trying to create a BartPE
LiveCD with DCCP v2.0 on it so that I could try my various HDDs in the
only working primary bay and to see if I could access my data. Before I
had time to complete this job, disaster struck again. Now for no
explicable reason and no major s/w installs or configuration changes, when
I tried to mount my DCCP volumes the m/c crashes. So I enter DCPP v2.0
main passphrase entry screen and enter the passphrase. The system starts
to mount the partitions however after around 45 seconds it crashes the m/c
and I have to boot again. This is my current situation, each time it does
the same, crashes after ~45s after passphrase entry.

I have ran a virus check and cannot find any obvious viruses/trojans. I
am in the process of building a BartPE disk with DCPP to see if I can
mount it within a clean windows XP/SP2 environment from BartPE. I am also
investigating the partion IDs etc.

Q3 - Has anyone had this prolem of crashing after passphrase entry?

Q4 - The recovery.exe tool, is it specific to each version of DCPP and to
me it appears as if it is only used for decrypting bootable volumes (e.g.
drive C:) as it asks for the key from the MBR or recovery disk. Could
someone clarify this please.

Q5 - Non related but when I used to enter the passphrase via the red
screen, it was a nightmare as unless I typed the characters very slowly,
it would interpret the keystrokes wrongly. Has anyone an idea why this is
happening?

Thanks for you patience in reading this complex scenario, any help or
suggestions will be greatly appreciated. TIA.

[Janko]

Hi tim, it's really a saga. I can't help myself, but it seems to me
that you seriously need a new piece of notebook ;) I don't believe it's
a problem of yahoo toolbar, even when it is a spyware.

Several times in my life i have experienced strange problems similar to
those you described, but everytimes i found the solution, with more or
less data loss - check if it cannot be one of them:

1. overcloked/overheating cpu
2. faulty ram (use either prime95 to test it and leave it running
overnight or memtest86 bootable cd)
3. bios limit (i had not compatible 48bit lba bios, it was fine until i
filled the disk so whatever i have written over 137gb i have lost and
overwritten some data at the beginning of the disk. I have heard there
existed also 64gb barrier on some bioses, also windows 2000 sp4 need a
registry patch for big drives. Your laptop configuration does not seem
as a piece of crap, but check if it really can support big drives and
if it is not faulty)

Just a few ideas, I wish i could give you better advice than this. Good
luck.

Janko.

[tim555]

Jenko, thx for the suggestion, however I am an experienced h/w and s/w
support consultant and had gone through your very sensible check list
already prior to posting. Further, my configuration had been working fine
for months so there is no logical reason for it to fail all of a sudden
especially when other OSes and various LiveCDs (BartPE/KNOPPIX) etc run
fine too. Its a puzzling problem but I have a feeling its directly
related to DCPP or at least I need to know how to recover my partition
data even if I take the disk out and stick it in another m/c.

[tim555]

Could someone clarify if recovery.exe supplied with a current version of
DCPP superceeds previous version, i.e. can a current version of
recovery.exe decrypt all partitions encrypted with DCPP versions older
than current version or is the program specific to each individual
version/release of DCPP.

[Shaun Hollingworth]

Post by tim555
Could someone clarify if recovery.exe supplied with a current version of
DCPP superceeds previous version, i.e. can a current version of
recovery.exe decrypt all partitions encrypted with DCPP versions older
than current version or is the program specific to each individual
version/release of DCPP.

Hi,
Always use the correct version....

Regards,
Shaun.