Feature request: encrypt and decrypt drives

[superbonaci]

Be able to encrypt and decrypt drives.

[Aorimn]

Do you mean USB drive? (formatted in FAT32)

[superbonaci]

Not really. I was thinking of NTFS, which you can use on hard drives, ssd or even pendrives, like the one used for issue #13. My intention is to use bitlocker as a complete replacement for truecrypt, since development has ceased. Actually encryption and decryption of drives can only be performed on windows, so there's no real portability.

AFAIK, there are 4 filesystems supported by windows: NTFS, FAT, FAT32 and exFAT. For the encryption there's bitlocker and bitlocker to go, which I presume are different. Probably bitlocker to go works in portable mode where you don't have administrative rights, since On The Fly encryption usually requires them.

[Aorimn]

But you already can decrypt NTFS pendrives and I don't think NTFS on ssd are encrypted differently.

On Windows 8, I only can format a data partition in NTFS, FAT and FAT32, not exFAT. Do you happen to know when exFAT support was dropped?

I think that BitLocker To Go is for FAT or FAT32 volumes, BitLocker for NTFS ones. dislocker doesn't decrypt FAT*, yet (as stated in issue #20)

[superbonaci]

Windows 8 does support exFAT, however you can only it for external drives. You can try manually for internal drives and check if successes: format g: /FS:exFAT

About encrypting the drive with dislocker: not possible yet.
About decrypting it: yes it's possible but not on the fly like Windows does. I mean directly decrypting the drive to itself, without having to extract the contents, reformat and write back.

Windows supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT and NTFS. Windows server supports also ReFS, which is a very resilient filesystem (probably not supported by linux yet). Here's a good comparison table:
http://m.windowsitpro.com/windows-server-2012/q-what-features-does-ntfs-support-refs-does-not-support

About Bitlocker To Go: it's merely a lightweight version of bitlocker, aimed to allow read only access on earlier windows xp and vista. It only supports ntfs on windows 7 and is read only.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970401

[Aorimn]

Indeed, the format command works pretty well.

So, is this issue the same as the issue #20 ?

[superbonaci]

Not, it's not. I meant dislocker not bitlocker, it's already corrected in the title.

[Aorimn]

About encrypting the drive with dislocker: not possible yet.
About decrypting it: yes it's possible but not on the fly like Windows does. I mean directly decrypting the drive to itself, without having to extract the contents, reformat and write back.

I would welcome any work on this, but won't have time to work on this myself.

[superbonaci]

So closing for now since it's not a bug.