Hard drive encryption
 

Do any of you know of any good advanced AES 256bit encryption programs for a personal computer? Has any one tried any of these as well? I'd want it to encrypt the whole hard drive not just individual files and the whole hard drive, not have a shadow drive. When I first boot the computer, it asks me for a username and password before loading windows.

Hmm... not sure if this is what you're looking for PhilBon, I haven't actually tried it but I found the link on openusability.org. It's a program called TrueCrypt.

@grimpirate: I saw that one and it's a hidden volume type of encryption. To where you boot to XP and then run the encryption, so your XP is still abled to be accessed.

Seems it'd have to be in your BIOS/bootloader, since the OS is stored to disk. Once you've encrypted the whole disk, you need to decrypt it just to boot.

There's some information on how to get a fully encrypted filesystem working under Linux (which requires some juggling of partitions to get to work), but I'm not sure that it's possible to do the same thing with XP. You can't extend XP in the same way as you can with Linux or a open source OS, and XP doesn't have the capability to boot off an encrypted filesystem natively.

I think the best you could do would be to have you Windows folder on one drive, and then to use something like TrueCrypt to keep all your important information on a virtual encrypted drive. Unfortunately, modern OSes tend to be quite messy with their data, so you may find information that you want to be secure cached in RAM or something.

I'd be interested if anyone discovers a way to do this under Windows, but I don't think it's possible to do what you want with XP without some form of virtualization.

There is a way to do it. I have found and tested "encryption anywhere", problem is that it's only sold to large end companies meaning more than 100 licenses. It encrypts the whole hard drive. The Boot for the hard drive is modified to go to it's login, and once it's login has been cleared, it starts to decrypt the files needed. So all the Windows Startup files it will decrypt. While you're working with it, it's constantly decrypting files you are using and encrypting the ones that you have used and are not using anymore.

Thank goodness for quad-core processing technology, and so on.

btw, do you mean the hard drive's login?, Windows login? or the pre-Windows-booting non-encrypted login potential of this application?

There would be two logins, at least with encryption anywhere, it has that login which is based on your windows information and then it has the windows login. So when you login to windows, you have to set your account up to work with encryption anywhere. But it would load even before any windows file has loaded. So I'd turn on my computer, it would post and then it would look to the hard drive for the OS, it would find the encryption boot record and boot to it. Once it booted it would prompt you for username and password. Once that has been validated, it will then boot normally to windows.