2015-11-24 Update
Since the time of the writing of this document, truecrypt’s reputation has been called into question. Truecrypt’s response was to disband/close. It is unclear/unproven if truecrypt had any issues or was simply getting out of the game while the getting was good. I can no longer recommend truecrypt and recommend replacing Truecrypt with an alternative. While LUKS/cryptsetup is not a 1-for-1 replacement of truecrypt, it is the tool I recommend using for any and all disk encryption.
Background
This post describes how to format a Truecrypt volume with EXT4.
Details
The following is a concise list of steps needed to format a Truecrypt volume with the EXT4 filesystem:
- Create a Truecrypt volume (specify ‘none’ for the filesystem or you can leave to any format you like but we will overwrite it later)
- Mount the Truecrypt volume and ensure you check the “do not mount” option under Filesystem
- Find the volume’s mountpoint
- Type $ ls /dev/mapper at a shell and you should see a list of mappers mountpoints. If it is not clear which one is your new volume, unmount it (from Truecrypt) and perform a
$ ls /dev/mapperthen remount it and do alsagain
- Type $ ls /dev/mapper at a shell and you should see a list of mappers mountpoints. If it is not clear which one is your new volume, unmount it (from Truecrypt) and perform a
- Format the volume with EXT4 (e.g.
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/truecrypt1- where truecrypt1 is the mountpoint found in the above step)
You are now finished! Unmount the truecrypt volume and remount it (ensuring to uncheck the “do not mount” option under Filesystem this time.
If you need a visual walk-through of the above steps see the Configuration Blog entry for more details.
