Hi all,

probably very trivial but i'm stuck.

I just installed truecrypt on Debian, painstakingly I must say, and I encrypted my whole external hard drive (hopefully).

Now I should map the volume (although I am not sure what that means)

# truecrypt /dev/sdb1
Enter password for '/dev/sdb1':

and then nothing happens. Should it take long? I encrypted a 180G HD. I stopped the process in the middle... is that a problem? I tried
# truecrypt -N 0 /dev/sdb1
but got the same.

the command:
# ls /dev/mapper/
returns:
control debian-home debian-root debian-swap_1 sda5_crypt

my home and root are already encrypted. I did that at the installation.

Any idea?

Any help is welcome.

See this post: http://www.howtoforge.com/truecrypt_data_encryption, specifically the section on Mounting created volumes. It looks like you are missing part of the command, which could explain the "hang" as it is waiting for you to finish inputting the necessary information. The section below that one talks about how to set it up to auto mount too.

I would also recommend that you think about your security objectives and what you are trying to protect against with the encryption. Encrypting your drive has benefits, but is not without risk. You should also consider if it is sufficient to encrypt your home folder or if you really need to encrypt the binary file system. This makes it much easier to boot the system.

OK thanks,

i think i went through this, and many other tutorials, but unfortunately it didn't help much with regards to mapping. There is never more than a single line on the mapping procedure.

In the command:
# truecrypt /root/home.txt -k /root/key

the '-k /root/key' is to open the key file at the same time. But I didn't create a keyfile when encrypting the disk: i added the option '--keyfile ""'.

So i don't know. I cannot find much on mapping the volume. I did it a long time ago and this part was not a problem.

By the way, I have encrypted root and home because I think that was the default. It doesn't bother me that much though. And I need home and my external hard drive to be encrypted because they contain patient information.

Thanks. If you have any other idea, I'm happy to hear them.

Best,