Vista - Truecrypt and OEM recovery partition

If I use truecrypt to encrypt an entiredrive will it affect the recovery partitions ability to function?

Why would you want that? The recovery is a separate partition, so windows sees it as a separate drive but it might have a fit restoring to an encrypted hard drive unless you decrypt beforehand. Try it and see, but first create an image of your pc, assuming its clean and up to date with Macrium Free Edition.

okie pokies, I was just wondering bc truecrypt only offers to encrypt the entire drive (reguardless of how many partitions) or just the windows partition... I have three partitions (one for os, one for all data, and the oem recovery partition. worst comes to worse I decrypt everything with my truecrypt recovery disk.

Exactly. You don't need to encrypt it. There will be a performance overhead.

And how do you feel about bitlocker?
4sysops - System drive encryption: TrueCrypt 5 vs. Bitlocker

He doesn't have Vista Ultimate.

yup only premium... I think its a bit stupid to require you to dish out the exta 100 bucks or watever for ultimate so yeah... truecrypt it is lol.

Try creating an image with Macrium Reflect Free too.

but then wouldn't the image file just get encrypted too?

Before the encryption, as a backup which you can mount with the app and browse.