Denied access to an internal HDD that Bitlocker supposedly decrypted.

Son Of A Vidic · 11-07-2014 12:19AM #1

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 · 16-07-2014 02:04PM

* 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.

yoyo · 16-07-2014 07:38PM

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

Denied access to an internal HDD that Bitlocker supposedly decrypted.

Comments