Denied access to an internal HDD that Bitlocker supposedly decrypted.

Son Of A Vidic

On Wednesday I had to transfer some work files onto my home PC. So for security, I decided to use Bitlocker to encrypt the drive. My OS is Windows Ultimate 64 bit and the drive is a backup internal HDD. I created a password in Bitlocker, created a data recovery key on a USB stick and encrypted the drive. The encryption process completed and everything seemed fine. I turned on my PC yesterday and went to access the dive. I was prompted for the password, entered it and nothing happened. I couldn't access my encrypted drive and got an access denied message. So when I right clicked on the drive, I selected the decrypt the drive option in the drop down menu.
The drive then began a decryption countdown process.

When finished, I was then told the drive was decrypted. The locked drive icon disappeared suggesting it was now unencrypted. Yet I was still denied access to the drive. At no stage did any Bitlocker interface/console pop up and give me any option to use my data recovery key to access the drive. So now I have a drive that’s apparently decrypted and I am denied access. So I’m curious to know, if any fellow Boardsies have ever encountered a similar problem with Bitlocker and how it was resolved.

Son Of A Vidic

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It turns out there were several options to the problems. Two solutions were via command prompt but needed a HDD of equal size to recover/decrypt the data from my locked drive. Since I had no spare HDD of equal size to do this I contacted Microsoft. Long story short and after several days & phone calls, a senior Microsoft technician sorted the problem out in 2 minutes. Apparently when Bitlocker encrypted the drive, I was not granted full access/privileges to the drive when it set up. This despite me being the only Admin on the PC. All very weird, so I would advise anyone thinking about using Bitlocker to be very careful and perhaps just try encrypting a couple of folders to make sure it has no gremlins.

yoyo

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

* Bump *


It turns out there were several options to the problems. Two solutions were via command prompt but needed a HDD of equal size to recover/decrypt the data from my locked drive. Since I had no spare HDD of equal size to do this I contacted Microsoft. Long story short and after several days & phone calls, a senior Microsoft technician sorted the problem out in 2 minutes. Apparently when Bitlocker encrypted the drive, I was not granted full access/privileges to the drive when it set up. This despite me being the only Admin on the PC. All very weird, so I would advise anyone thinking about using Bitlocker to be very careful and perhaps just try encrypting a couple of folders to make sure it has no gremlins.

Thanks for the update Corvus, glad you got it sorted in the end

Nick