Following shaneselman's advice (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheComputerBackupRuleOfThree.aspx), I'm setting up a 2TB external drive as a backup, and encrypting it using TrueCrypt. This is under Windows 7. (I've used TrueCrypt before, but not since XP days.) I installed TrueCrypt with default options.

After taking 23 hours to format the 2TB container, it finishes with an error saying "TrueCrypt cannot obtain administrator privileges." When I click OK on that, it says it can't format the container as NTFS, do I want to format it as FAT, and I don't so I click No, and it exits with nothing to show for 23 hours of compute time.

So I set the "Run as administrator flag" on the TrueCrypt shortcut, and try again. This time, when I go to format the contain (prepared to wait ANOTHER 23 hours), it pops up a dialog saying you're formatting this as administrator. "The volume may be created with permissions that will not allow you to write to the volume when it is mounted. If you want to avoid that, close this instance of Volume Creation Wizard and launch a new one without administrator privileges."

Great - I can either run as non-administrator, and it will fail to create the volume at all, or I can run as administrator and create a volume I can't write to.

I think I'm doing something wrong, but it's not clear to me what. Any help?