Now if your paranoid I’m sure you’ve already discovered the great and mighty Truecrypt to encrypt your whole drive, but there’s a lesser reported feature they’ve included that will give you another reason for “plausible deny-ability” in so much as you don’t wan’t to be hastled by air traffic control asking your password’s, or even tip them off that you have your full drive encrypted in the first place, How about when you boot your pc for them, the dredded “Missing operating system” message pop’s up instead of the truecrypt boot manager?! Here’s how you do that.

Of course I’m assuming you already have Truecrypt installed and your drive encrypted. If you don’t there’s a ton of posts out there that will help you along the way.

Boot into your OS of choice and open Truecrypt. Open the Settings Option from the menu.

From the Setting’s menu, choose “Preferences” which will open another window full of options.

From that window, Choose the button at the bottom that say’s “More Options”

From the menu that pop’s up, choose “Encryption Settings…”

This will bring up yet another window, that will have the setting’s we’ve been looking for. Put a checkmark in the first box “Do not show any text in the preboot…..” and then choose what you’ld like it to say instead, such as “Missing operating system” but DO read the notes below as they tell you stuff like no text will be displayed when you enter your password or an incorrrect password. Good to know before you think you really did corrupt your MBR!

That’s it! Now when you power on your PC you’ll be greeted with the scarry word’s “Missing operating system” however you’ll still be able to login and your OS should start without any issues! So again, I say Thanks Truecrypt!

(on a side note you might wan’t to bring along an old copy of your XP install disk just in case someone at the airport or what have you, does ask why your bringing a broken laptop with you.)