Is it possible to resize TrueCrypt partitions?

When I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, I created a large partition on the hard drive to encrypt with TrueCrypt. Turns out I'm not using the amount of space I thought I would be for encrypting data, and I'm running out of space in my root partition.

Is it possible to resize a TrueCrypt partition with something like GParted, or will I need to first move everything out of the encrypted partition, blow it away, add some of the newly available space to my existing root partition, and then create a new TrueCrypt partition?

TrueCrypt partitions aren't resizeable. You need to create new TrueCrypt partition of larger size. Maybe even two of them, as the data must be stored somewhere at the time of reformatting, and it still must be safe (encrypted). Recently I was extending size of my Truecrypt partition and used USB-HDD + TrueCrypt to hold the data in the meantime.

I can tell that you can do this if you are going to truncate the partition at the end, meaning your root partition is allocated to higher sector addresses than the TrueCrypt partition.

Otherwise there might be a way, but I have no experience with that, yet.

For the former case, proceed like this:

• mount the volume using TrueCrypt to slot 1
• ummount the filesystem from the truecrypt device: sudo umount /dev/mapper/truecrypt1
• use ntfsresize to shrink the filesystem: sudo ntfsresize -s <whatever size> /dev/mapper/truecrypt1
• check the filesystem wihtin the mounted volume using chkdsk
• truncate the partition at the end using parted (delete the old partition and create a new partition stating at the same start sector as the old one and which is big enough to hold the shrunken file system)
• use a modified version of extcv in Windows to update the TrueCrypt volume headers and adjust the filesystem to the new boundary

Anyways you should check out a more detailed guide on this so you understand what you are doing. However, this procedure requires some knowledge and experience with handling partitions.

I have yet to test it, but this project does claim to support re-sizing volumes without formatting.

You can only resize encrypted system partitions and you must do it while the encrypted operating system is running.

On Windows 7 I just used the regular tools to increase the size of the partition (Disk Management > Extend Volume).

Source:

Encrypted partitions cannot be resized except partitions on an entirely encrypted system drive that are resized while the encrypted operating system is running.