Drive Encryption

[Slott]

Hi all, at my company apparently we are going to be required to encrypt some of the hard drives for computers, notably ones that travel in and out of the country. Does anyone know of any good software to use for a windows XP laptop, that already has data on it? (ie; not a fresh drive). In addition, something for a server and windows 7 would be good for future use. Thanks.

[xopher]

As far as I know the drive has to be encrypted before you put data on it. You could encrypt a new blank drive with something like truecrypt and then move the data over, but I'm not sure if it would be bootable after that.

[chiyio]

Truecrypt can encrypt a drive with data already on it no problem, do it all the time. Truecrypt will work for all the issues OP mentioned.

[hey]

Truecrypt works great. As mentioned you can indeed encrypt with data on it, even while using the drive, and you can boot from an encrypted drive.

[xopher]

Ah. I stand corrected. Either way, yeah Truecrypt is awesome. Hidden partitions ftw.

[GoggleHead]

We use Truecrypt here. My only beef with it is that it makes boot CD based utilities kinda useless for disaster recovery due to the way it messes with the MBR.

[Obiron]

As an alternative (I haven't used Truecrypt, so not offering any comparisons), Symantec Endpoint Encryption can also encrypt a drive that already has data on it. My last company started rolling it out shortly before I left, so I had very limited time with it, but the rollout went pretty smoothly.

[Slott]

thanks for all of the replies, will look into both truecrypt and the symantec one.

[raginbull]

I use BitLocker and it's great. Not sure if all versions of Windows 7 and 8 have it included though. I'm running Win 8 Pro and it's built in. It was in Win 7 Ultimate too.