Truecrypt, Extra Harddrive, and Virtual Box

In my day to day stuff, I use vm's extensively. My laptop is an i5 with 16 gigs of ram and 2 ssd's. I use 1 ssd for the system drive and another one houses all of my vm's.

I've been meaning to do full drive encryption for a while using Truecrypt but just didn't have the time. So this weekend I finally got around to doing it. Encrypting the system drive went as expected. It took about 30 minutes to encrypt and everything went well. When I got around to encrypting my other drive, it all went as planned. Or so I thought.

After encryption and verifying I could reboot and everything automounted with Truecrypt, I went to fire up a vm. Uh oh, the vm files can't be found. I didn't notice that when the Truecrypt encryption happens for a non-system drive, it cannot reuse the same drive letter. 

This meant that I needed to recreate all of my vm's, or essentially copy the vm data to an external drive and wipe the internal drive for the vm's. Short story, non of my options were very good ones.

But then an idea. I figured that if I can't reuse the same drive letter for mounting the encrypted drive, I need to use another drive letter to begin with. 

• VM drive letter was D
• Renamed VM drive letter from D to E
• Went to Truecrypt and removed my automount setting
• Added a new automount setting to mount the "new" E drive as D drive
• So now all of my snapshots and settings in Virtual Box that pointed to the D drive all work as normal. No need for starting up new vm's.

So since there doesn't seem to be a good way of removing encryption altogether from an external drive, this was the next best thing as a workaround. So now I have a fully encrypted system drive and extra drive whilst maintaining all of my original path settings.