Windows 10: Bitlocker not encrypting document partition (Windows 10 Pro)

I've turned on Bitlocker on my laptop. It doesn't seem to have encrypted all of my logical drives, and for a couple of them it doesn't give me the option.

I have a 1 TB hybrid drive which currently has 4 partitions: C, E, F, and a recovery partition. As far as I recall, I created 3 of these myself: C for my OS, E for most of my documents, and the recovery partition, all of which existed before I turned on Bitlocker. I believe Bitlocker created F when it encrypted C, but I wasn't really paying attention. I don't recall creating it myself.

C was encrypted initially when I turned Bitlocker on. F, which it notes to be a "fixed data drive", it allowed me to encrypt afterwards. E, the largest partition, with most of my documents, doesn't show up as a drive in the Bitlocker management window. Nor does the recovery partition, and unlike C and F, neither E nor the recovery partition say "Bitlocker Encrypted" in the Disk Management window.

How do I encrypt E? And is it possible to encrypt the recovery partition?

:)

 

How to Turn On BitLocker in Windows 10 Home?

As you said, Windows 10 Home can read BitLocker partitions but cannot encrypt partitions. Is there any Third-party software that can encrypt partitions with BitLocker?

 

How to Turn On BitLocker in Windows 10 Home?

As you said, Windows 10 Home can read BitLocker partitions but cannot encrypt partitions. Is there any Third-party software that can encrypt partitions with BitLocker?

Bitlocker is a proprietary Microsoft product, not a generic term for encryption. You do a web search for

data encryption software.

 

Welcome to TenForums Aaron.

As I only have a "C" drive.......encrypted not sure if it is possible to do other drives as in your case.
Open File Explorer, click on This PC, right click on drive you wish to turn on Bitlocker.

 

If you didn't have a system partition then enabling bitlocker would do this. It needs something unencrypted to boot from. It should not have a drive letter assigned though.

No it isn't - recovery wouldn't work. There is no point anyway - it is only Microsoft stuff, not your data. Similarly you can't encrypt your EFI or System partitions.

Normally in file explorer, right click > manage bitlocker and turn it on. Certainly you should be able to encrypt E and certainly you have to do it separately from C. There is a tutorial here if you didn't see it already Turn On or Off BitLocker for Fixed Data Drives in Windows 10 Windows 10 Security System Tutorials

I'm assuming that E is a primary partition on the same physical drive (or another internal one). Please post a picture of disk management though to confirm as perhaps when you say "logical drive" you mean mbr extended partition.

You need to expand the columns before posting the picture so no descriptions are truncated in the "Status" column at the top. Try to make it look like the picture below. This is from a legacy BIOS Lenovo laptop - you can see C and D volumes are encrypted, System Reserved and recovery partition (I decided to name mine "Rescue" for some reason) are not.

 

Thanks for the replies. Here are the drives shown on my computer:





And here's what's shown as available for encryption by bitlocker:






Thoughts?

 

BTW, consistent with the above, the right-click menu in File Explorer doesn't display any option to manage BitLocker for my E drive partition, only for my C drive.

 

You can't encrypt your system partition. Bitlocker uses the system partition to unlock the others.

God only knows why you have your 781GB E volume set as system but you do.





If you want to encrypt E then you'd have to juggle your partitions around and make a normal system partition. 500MB (not GB) should be fine.

Disable bitlocker, use MiniTool Partition Wizard to move partitions and EasyBCD to move the boot files.

Try to make your layout look like mine - 500MB for system, some GB for C, some GB for D and so on.

One thing to be aware of is you can only have 4 primary partitions on a mbr formatted disk so you will have to merge some (or drop recovery). Perhaps the 511MB (currently F) partition could be marked as active and be the system partition but that is your call.

If you need some advice/help on assigning your partitions then just say.

 

Thanks very much; I noticed the "system" designation sometime after posting and was about to come back and say something about it. I'll give your advice a try and report back (or ask for assistance if necessary).

 

Okay, so I removed the recovery partition, and tried to turn that into the system/boot partition with EasyBCD. It seemed to move the boot files, but maybe I missed a step, as my computer couldn't find the OS when I restarted. Thanks to Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE, best $20 I ever spent), and some more fooling around, I got to this point:







Curiously, EasyRE deleted the F drive partition, which, as I mentioned, I hadn't remembered creating anyway.

So, in spite of the disappearance of F, everything seems more or less in order. BitLocker shows as available to encrypt both the C and the E drives. Except that when I try to encrypt the C drive, after BitLocker checks to make sure the drive meets its criteria, I get this:







I think my initial problem has been solved. Any help on this next issue would be greatly appreciated. Should I start a new thread?

 

I'm currently looking into restoring winre.wim, in case that's the issue, as I've found reference to this file being necessary, and my computer says it doesn't currently exist. Between me removing the recovery partition and EasyRE removing the mysterious F drive partition, maybe I got rid of the Windows Recovery Environment. (I'm sort of flying blind in all of this.)

 

I'm officially at a loss, but I'll mark this solved for the original problem.

 

WinRe isn't really required (you can always boot from installation media). If you want to make a partition containing it look at this:

Deploy Windows RE

Basically you need to put it somewhere and then use the reagentc command to register it. reagent /info will tell you if you have a registered recovery partition (and which one) like this:

Code: PS C:\Windows\system32> reagentc /info Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration Information: Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 3be03281-176e-11e7-b4ff-c30418e09fae Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0 REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful. PS C:\Windows\system32>[/quote] If it doesn't say "enabled" you should be able to figure it out from the link above but do say if you aren't sure.

Your disk layout is odd (normally the system volume is before C) but actually partition order doesn't matter. I'd leave it

 

@lx07, thanks for your continued assistance. With the help of instructions on another site, before you responded I think I got it to the point you show:







However, the site I was following then said that if the "Recovery image location" line is blank (as mine is), there are more steps to follow. However, I don't have a lot more time to devote to this, and I came to the conclusion that you state, i.e. that I could just boot from installation media.

In any event, the real problem I need to solve is that BitLocker is now unable to encrypt C (which originally was able to be encrypted, as in my original screenshot), and is only able to encrypt E (which originally was not being encrypted due to the "system" designation, as you pointed out).

I don't know if WinRE had/has anything to do with it, but the problem remains. BitLocker checks the drive, and then it says "Please wait while BitLocker initializes the drive", at which point I get the message that the system can't find whatever file it's looking for. I don't know why it's not smart enough to transfer any files it needs from E, which seems like it could be an easy solution, but I'm as unsmart as my computer, and I don't know how to do it.

 

I have an even bigger problem now, caused in part by impatience.

I decided I wanted the C partition to be bigger (and thought I should resize it before dealing anymore with the encryption issue). I decrypted and shrank E, and moved the unallocated space adjacent to C. For some reason, instead of merely resizing C, I formatted this new space to NTFS (as C already was), and then I thought I'd go ahead and merge the two partitions. All of this was done using MiniTool Partition Wizard. All seemed well until the merger.

Upon completion of the merger, I got a BSOD saying there was an NTFS stop code error. I though maybe EasyRE could deal with this automatically, but it hasn't been able to. It seems to be able to see the C partition, and see that there's an operating system on it, but can't make my computer see it. The version of GParted on EasyRE says that it can't read any data on that partition. It tells me this about it:

Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
The cause might be a missing software package.
The following list of software packages is required for ntfs
file system support: ntfs-3g / ntfsprogs.

I don't know what to do with this information. GParted itself returns an error when I try to use it to check the partition with it. I'd love to be able to save the details of the error but the instructions online for how to do this through the console it provides don't match what I see on my computer. (The location of my USB drive doesn't show up [that I can see, and certainly not as the online instructions say] and so I can't mount it.)

I have all of the data synced onto another machine, but still, I should have taken an image. It will be a pain to reinstall Windows and Office and my various programs etc. if that's what I have to do.