Instructions on Use

Pretty much everything in FreeOTFE works as it seems, and should be fairly self explanatory. Because FreeOTFE's interface is pretty intuitive, this section will not go into too much detail as to how everything works. For the most part, if there's anything you're not too sure of, an educated guess will most likely give you the right answer.

PC Version Specific

Windows Vista Specific

User Access Control (UAC)
Windows Vista incorporates a new security system called "User Access Control" (UAC), which is there to help prevent malicious software from doing things which could be harmful to your computer.

As part of this new security system, you will find a number of FreeOTFE's menuitems are marked with a "shield" icon - specifically, those which relate to installing or changing FreeOTFE's drivers, starting/stopping portable mode, and formatting.

Whenever you attempt to use functionality which is marked with one of these icons, Windows will display a dialog (the "consent/credential" dialog), asking for your permission to allow FreeOTFE to continue. This is for your protection, and is perfectly normal. You will be shown this dialog even if you are logged on as an Administrator

Because the FreeOTFE executable does not have a digital signature that Windows recognises, this dialog will state that "An unidentified program wants access to your computer". Again, this is perfectly normal. If you would like to check that your copy of FreeOTFE is an original, you may do so by checking the hashes/signatures available from the FreeOTFE WWW site.

If you are logged on as a "standard" (i.e. non-Administrator) user, the prompt you are shown will also ask for an Administrator's password. It should be emphasised that it is Windows Vista itself which is generating these prompts, and not FreeOTFE, which will have no access to the password you type in. The same type of dialog will appear when you attempt to (for example) go to Window's Control Panel, selecting "Date and Time", and then attempting to change the computer's time or date.

If you are happy for FreeOTFE to carry out the operation you requested of it, you should select the relevant option from the consent/credential dialog to allow FreeOTFE to proceed.

You can find out more about UAC from the Microsoft WWW site.


PDA Version Specific

If you intend using your encrypted volumes with both PDAs and PCs, please ensure that you initially create and format them using the PC version to ensure that they can be read by either system. If a volume is created on a PDA, your PDA will format it in a slightly different manner (i.e. it will be include additional, unused, information at the start of the partition), which will prevent your PC from reading it correctly - even though it works correctly with a PDA. Volume files created on a PC can be used freely with both PDAs and PCs.

When mounting a volume under the PDA version, if you have more than one cypher/hash driver combination which can be used to decrypt the volume in question, the first valid combination will be used. This is unlike the PC version, which will prompt you to select which one you wish to use. If you wish the PDA version to use a specific cypher/hash driver implementation when mounting volumes, please remove all other cypher/hash drivers which implement the same cypher/hash. See FAQ relating to duplicate drivers.