It sounds to me as if the problem may with your hardware rather than with TrueCrypt. I have and external CD/DVD writer connected to one of my computers (it's the only CD/DVD drive I have nowadays). When I burn a data disc and eject, reload and mount it afterwards to verify its content, quite often it takes several mount attempts (in Linux) before the mount succeeds. It seems that the drive itself needs quite some time to read data from the disc to decide what it is before it is available to the OS. If I reload the disc and wait for the drive to stop making noises and only then mount it it always works on the first try. The disc is perfectly ok, the drive needs time to get ready. Although I don't have any problem booting from that drive it suggests that timing does matter. Perhaps your drive gets ready too late for an impatient boot sequence. Try to access the boot device selection menu (F12 in the BIOS screen, the last time I used it, but that may depend on the manufacturer and on the accuracy of my ...