To put it short I really find it baffling when I can't open encrypted external hard disk drive in Safe Mode in Windows operating system. Every time, I try to open it the Windows displays warning message dialog of '' This driver is not accessible'' as if it is a bad drive. The same encrypted drive would open in normal Windows 10 mode with my password. The reason I am so curious about it is that in one time I have an issue with a system infected with USB virus and running application on it becomes very difficult because it has a deep freeze security installed to it. After removing the USB virus at reboot it will return again thereby creating a loop - in Safe Mode things seem to work fine. Opening a program I need to use at that point from my external hard drive is not possible due to the inaccessibility of the drive. The whole process of running the program becomes tedious and at the end I have to abandon it. I don't know if anybody know any mean on how to make it work, to open encrypted external hard disk drive in Safe Mode in Windows 10 or other Windows OS and copy files from it without removing the encryption. Any idea is highly welcome.
Safe Mode loads a very minimal set of drivers and services. I would imagine that the driver/service required to encrypt/decrypt the drive is not loaded in safe mode. Is the virus actually present in the encrypted container of the drive? If that is the case it would seem like you would infect any other machine you plug it into as well. If not you could try booting off a dvd version of your virus cleaner and cleaning the virus off the drive. You may need to fully decrypt the drive and run the virus cleaner before encrypting it again.