Encrypted Partitions

I am very late to the game here, I've being using gnugpg for years to encrypt files - but only recently have I looked at encryting entire partitions, for example on an external drive.

Having seen it is common place on Ubuntu/Fedora for internal drives on operating system install. But for a seperate drive it is easy too:

cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/sdb1

This formats the partition ready for use with LUKS a standard for encrypted filesystems. This will prompt for the passphrase to access the volume.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 secretfs

This associates the file /dev/mapper/secretfs to the device, through which encrytion will occur. The passphrase will be prompted for.

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/mapper/secretfs

To create the ext3 filesystem.

mount /dev/mapper/secretfs /media/disk

This mounts the newly created volume.

All very neat and simple, do that on Windows!