Create Encrypted Hidden container for keeping your secret files using TrueCrypt

This is the second tutorial on using TrueCrypt, this tutorial assumes you have already installed TrueCrypt on your machine and you have created one container using the steps we already described in the previous tutorial.


Open TrueCrypt program and click on ‘Create Volume’ button as follow

The new volume creation wizard begins; select the first option (Create an encrypted file container) and hit the ‘Next’ button as follow

TrueCrypt asks you for the type of volume you want to create, select second choice (Hidden TrueCrypt volume) and click ‘Next’ to continue

Next window in wizard asks you whether you already have a TrueCrypt container and you want create a hidden volume inside it (Direct Mode) OR whether you want to create a TrueCrypt container and then create the hidden one inside it (Normal Mode), in my case I already created a TrueCrypt container in the first part of this tutorial so I will select the ‘Direct Mode’ and click ‘Next’ to continue

Now I need to select my file (the encrypted volume I’ve already created in the first part of this tutorial) as follow

Click ‘Next’ to continue , the next window asks us to enter the outer volume password (this is the password that we have entered for our previous encrypted volume not the hidden one that we are creating now)

Now a confirmation message appears informing us that the volume has been scanned and it is already ready to begin creating the hidden one inside it , hit the ‘Next’ button to continue

Now TrueCrypt ask us to choose the encryption algorithm and hash algorithm for our hidden volume , as we mentioned before this is a wide topic so choose the default settings which is quite enough.

Now the wizard specify the maximum size that the hidden volume can take , in our example the outer volume size is 125 MB the maximum hidden volume determined by TrueCrypt is 123.12 MB , I decide to make the hidden volume size 50 MB as follow

Now we need to set a password for the hidden volume, as advised by TrueCrypt it is better to choose long password that contains both small and capital letters in addition to numbers and symbols , we can also further secure the authentication process through adding a keyfile but this is an optional step.

Finally, the wizard give us the choice to select which file system we need to set for our hidden volume and the cluster size of the partition, use FAT file system and keep the default settings for the cluster file size, we need also the move the cursor inside the window for at least 5 minutes to increase the security of the encryption keys, after this hit the ‘Format’ button to continue

A success message pop up mentioning that the creation of a new hidden volume was successful , click ‘OK’ to continue

The final window in the wizard appears; click ‘Exit’ to continue.

Opening the hidden volume:

Open TrueCrypt, select a drive letter and then select your encrypted container and hit the ‘Mount’ button as follow

The password dialog appears, here you need to enter the hidden volume password, if you entered the out volume password you will access to the outer volume not to the hidden one, this is how TrueCrypt determine which volume he should opens

Click ok , if you entered a valid password for the hidden volume , the volume will be mounted (opened) with a label mentioned it is a hidden volume

We can open the hidden volume by right clicking the volume name and selecting ‘Open’ or by going to Windows explorer and opening the new mounted disk as follow

After finishing from adding /deleting files/ folder to your hidden volume , right click on its name in the program interface and select ‘Dismount’ as follow

In the same way we can right click on TrueCrypt icon on the task bar and select the volume you want to dismount as follow

In this tutorial we show you how to create a hidden volume inside another ordinary TrueCrypt volume, in the third part of this series of tutorials on TrueCrypt we are going to show you how to encrypt a system partition using this fantastic program.

Download TrueCrypt Program from here (3.3 MB)