Encrypt your Hard Drive with VeraCrypt

You can use VeraCrypt to encrypt your hard drive. Go to the System menu and select, Encrypt System Partition / Hard Drive.

If you choose the Normal method of encryption, you'll be given the option to either encrypt the entire partition on which the Windows OS is running, or the complete hard drive. Users of a laptop notebook may have a special recovery partition that will lead an encrypted hard drive to become unbootable, so it may be wise to use the former option. VeraCrypt will allow you to account for a situation where you have more than one operating system installed.

You can select between nine different algorithms to encrypt the data.

At the next stage you'll be prompted to enter a password which must be between 20 and 64 characters. If you select the option for key files, you'll have to provide certain key files on a USB drive. The option for a PIM - Personal Iterations Multiplier - will require that you enter a number, which will later have to be given with a password when you boot up the computer.

At the next stage you move your mouse randomly in order to increase the strength of the encryption keys.

As part of the process you're required to create a recovery disk on an optical disk. If the bootloader gets damaged you can use this to get into your encrypted drive.

VeraCrypt also gives you the option to wipe unencrypted data on your drive.

When you reboot your computer, you'll have to enter the password to unencrypt the drive before your regular Windows login. Note that you'll be prompted to enter a PIM even if you haven't set one. Just press enter if you did not select this option.