[Cryptography] TrueCrypt issues

[Michael Kjörling]

On 3 Dec 2015 19:51 +0000, from sacanoid at gmail.com (SacanoID):
> the thing is i've did lots of mess,how do i get the data again
> without doing more mess?

You reformat and restore your most recent backup. You _do_ have
backups, right?

I don't use TrueCrypt (never have), but it sounds like the container
has somehow become corrupted (which might possibly related to that
unplugged cable you found). Once a FDE container becomes corrupted,
it's often down to sheer luck whether you are able or not to recover
the data. Simply enough, if the corruption hits the "right" spots, and
assuming that the cryptography is proper and implemented correctly,
even what would otherwise be trivial corruption affecting just a
single file or folder (and often overcome fairly easily using common
data recovery software) can easily lead to total data loss.

Given the symptoms you describe, it appears that you have found
yourself on the wrong side of this luck.

I won't say that recovery is _impossible_ at this point; I don't know
enough to make such a statement. But at this point, it certainly
sounds like restoring from backup is the quickest way to get your data
back.

This type of failure is a reason why, when using full-disk encryption,
solid backups is even _more important_ than otherwise (and they are
already important in every case, because in the case of Our Data vs
Universe, Universe has yet to lose).

What you _should_ have done, before you started trying to fix this,
was to make a low-level copy of your TrueCrypt container, and kept one
of the copies pristine while working with the other. That would have
allowed you to roll back any changes made and get back to the original
broken state ("fixing" any additional corruption introduced by your
attempts at recovery). If you want to keep troubleshooting, you
_absolutely_ should do that now, before taking any further steps.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)