The Encrypted Laptop Howto
This is an update to my original series of guides released in October 2007 (the date is now January 2009). A great deal has changed since I wrote those guides, for instance the release of a Truecrypt version that can encrypt system partitions, and I expect a great deal will change over the coming 15 months.
My old guides can be accessed via this link (the menu to the left of the screen has links to each article). The original PDF can still be downloaded here.
Complete hard disk encryption as something a mainstream PC user would do is becoming much more common, which is probably due to the increasing media publicity of identity theft and even with new software tools protecting your personal privacy is becoming much harder (for example we can tell from your IP almost instantly, unless you are using a strange ISP or some form of anonymization, that you are somewhere in The United States) .
This guide therefore is for anyone who uses both Linux and Windows and wishes to protect their digital identity/ data. It also does this in a way which optimises available hard disk space by creating encrypted home/ My Documents and swap/ page file partitions accessible from both operating systems.
Rather than writing a one guide does all this time I have just concentrated on a 32bit Windows XP/ OpenSuSE 11.1 single hard disk laptop. I've aimed the guide at novice users who have a little experience of administrating both operating systems, hopefully advanced users will also find the commands and scripts of use.
The guide can be downloaded as a PDF here. The content of this PDF can be copied to help create the example scripts but is subject to the site copyright rules, as found on the disclaimer page.
In addition to the use of the latest Truecrypt version this guide, by popular demand, uses NTFS as the shared document partition type rather than Ext3.