password protecting an external hard drive

i just want to be able to plug in my external hard drive, have it pop up in my computer, double click it and have it prompt up a password box. that would be ideal. so far i've tried two programs.

storagecrypt2. i encrypted the hard drive which makes it undetectable on the computer. that's good enough but had a hell of a time getting it back. attempting to go back into storagecrypt kept giving me a fatal error that it was in use or something to that effect. it eventually took restarting and reinstalling to get in there. it occured to me that unless i'm doing something wrong, you'd have to install storagecrypt on whatever computer you want access to your drive to decrypt and use it. not a good option for me.

i also used folder lock. while it gives you the option of setting up a locked folder inside the drive i'd really like to be able to lock up the drive as a whole since there's some location sensitive stuff that i need to keep where it is rather than confine it all to one folder.

any ideas here? it doesn't have to be freeware.

 

Use TruCrypt. Its fast, secure, supports multiple platforms and FREE! Nothing can beat that.

 

Out of curiosity, does TruCrypt needs a service or needs to be running in order to hide the new disk ?

 

Windows (linux or any other supported OS for that matter) cannot read trucrypt encrypted partitions. Therefore you don’t have to have anything running for not being able to read it, but you need to run trucrypt to read it.

 

Good news Gonna give it a go for the fun of it

 

CooLMinE mate , check out this post

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4014979&postcount=4

 

Hehe yea i figured out how it works. Used to use one about 7-8 years ago

But since everything these days seem to use a service to run i just wanted to make sure

 

again though truecrypt provides the same problem as storagecrypt for me in that i need the program to decrypt it. i'm going to need to access the HD on multiple computers that don't belong to me and would not be comfortable downloading something like that onto someone else's property. would also definitely raise eyebrows.

 

TrueCrypt actually lets you run the application portable. That means that you just keep the folder containing the TrueCrypt files on the drive itself, and you can run them from it, without installing anything.

You can read further about this feature on TrueCrypt's documentation website. It's described under the category, "Traveler Mode".