T420s + SSD + Truecrypt

I want to make sure I don't mess everything up on my laptop that I waited a month and a half to get.

So, if I want to encrypt just the c: drive on here, keep the windows 7 boot loader and lenovo recovery (made my recovery disks already - not sure I want to waste 15 GB of my 160 GB, don't have the recovery partition on my T400 and don't miss it), do I select to just encrypt the system partition and not the entire drive then choose multi-boot. After that step, it prompts me with a question of:

Code:

Boot Drive

Yes
No

Is the currently running operating system installed on the first boot drive?

Note: Sometimes Windows is not installed on the same drive as the Windows boot loader (boot partition).  If that is the case select 'No'

So, I am not sure what this answer is, as a look at the disk manager iside windows 7 shows 3 partitions on the Intel 160 GB SSD drive:

Lenovo Recovery, Windows7_OS, SYSTEM_DRV

On my current T400, I messed up the windows recovery bootup, when I installed Truecrypt a couple years ago, so don't want to make the same mistake again.

Anyone out there with definitive steps to use truecrypt properly?

 

I encrypted my drive last month through Truecrypt, and it worked fine. I chose:
-encrypt system partition only
-no to protected area
-single boot

I'll need to do it again soon, as I had to reinstall Windows (for unrelated reasons). I might try to encrypt the whole drive, including protected area. We'll see...

 

Can you get to the windows recovery console and the lenovo partition via the blue button using the choices you specified?

 

I don't have the blue button on my Edge, but I suspect it would work. That recovery method is almost by definition not tied to the current bootloader (thus not affected by its takeover by Truecrypt), and of course you wouldn't be encrypting the recovery partition.

But why not simply burn some recovery discs, and ditch the partition? Given the infrequency of its use, it's a waste of space for a vast majority of the time.

 

Have you used the windows recovery console?

 

I haven't tried it while my drive was encrypted, but that only starts after the bootloader process, doesn't it? Truecrypt will have already done its thing by that point.

 

On my current T400 fully encrypted drive, the recovery console doesn't work properly.