June 14, 20251 yr Hello everyone!Last night I got a new external HDD. When I plugged it in, it mounted fine as device Dev 1 with the path /dev/sdb. Then /dev/sdb1 was the EFI partition, and /dev/sdb2 was where all the data goes. So after it was mounted, I used the Veracrypt GUI docker app by dcflachs to encrypt /dev/sdb2. Then I did a full back up to it using an Rsync script. When I unmounted it, then mounted it again to check its size (because it didn't update the amount of space used after the backup was done) The root of the device mounted fine as sdb, and the EFI partition mounted fine as sdb1. Bujt now where the main storage partition is supposed to be, it shows up as ZXA0FXV4-part2, and the button "Umount" isn't there. I thought it would automatically mount and I could then decrypt it using Veracrypt and pointing it at /dev/scb2 but of course its not working because its not mounted. Is there a better way of doing this? Because the way I did it is not working. All I want in the end is an encrypted external drive where the data is only accessible once its decrypted. I thought this way would work but it doesn't seem like it is.Does anyone have any ideas?Thanks in advance!
June 14, 20251 yr Community Expert Sounds like you're supposed to not encrypt the whole drive because otherwise unraid won't be able to mount it, but just store a veracrypt image on it.https://hub.docker.com/r/dcflachs/veracrypt-guiWhy not just use the standard and built-in LUKS encryption? Edited June 14, 20251 yr by Kilrah
June 14, 20251 yr Author Honestly I didn't even know Unraid had that feature! That would be a lot easier if I could figure out how to do it. That link you put in your message to the Veracrypt GUI is what I used to do it with. I didn't want to put it all in some file container because of speed reasons. I thought it would be better to do whole disk encryption.
June 16, 20251 yr Author On 6/14/2025 at 4:10 PM, Kilrah said:Sounds like you're supposed to not encrypt the whole drive because otherwise unraid won't be able to mount it, but just store a veracrypt image on it.https://hub.docker.com/r/dcflachs/veracrypt-guiWhy not just use the standard and built-in LUKS encryption?Is the standard encryption compatible with Veracrypt? I need to be able to access the external drive from Windows too. I would need to be able to decrypt in Unraid of course, as well as my Debian and Windows machines. I can accomplish all of that with Veracrypt which is why I was trying to get it to work this way.
June 16, 20251 yr Community Expert Solution Probably not. LUKS will mount just fine on any linux distro, Windows there are workarounds using WSL.If you like Veracrypt that's probably still the more appropriate solution for you, just you have to make an image file instead of whole disk encryption. I doubt it'd have much impact on perf.
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