Windows 10: Cannot enable BitLocker's auto unlock on system volume.

Greetings.I need to enable auto unlock of BitLocker on multiple devices. But for some reason on some devices different models i can only enable it for non-system disk "Disk D". When it comes to system disk "Disk C" i just don't have this option, it's either password-unlock or unlock via usb-key. By the way i have compared devices that don't suffer this problem and problematical ones. Even versions of TPM module are the same. So i'm totally lost at this point.How can i solve this problem?Thanks for your answers.

:)

 

Enable Bitlocker auto-unlock without system drive encryption

1. turn off bitlocker on the drive you want to auto-unlock
   
2. mount this drive as a removable drive
   i.e plug it into a usb attached drive unit such as StarTech or many others
   
3. boot the system and bitlock the drive and turn on auto-unlock
   
4. shutdown the system
   
5. mount the drive as a permanent drive
   
6. reboot the system and the drive will auto-unlock because windows now thinks
   that it is a removable drive
   

Works For Me with no problems

 

Enable Bitlocker auto-unlock without system drive encryption

Does anyone know of any trick - registry change, group policy etc. which will allow a Bitlocker volume to be auto-unlocked without having a bitlocker encrypted system drive?

My system drive is a Samsung 850 Pro SSD, so it obviously has built-in encryption, which I enable by using a bios drive password.

I'm not using Bitlocker on the system drive, because with my bios I can't configure it to use the native hardware encryption, so it'd be wasting resources encrypting with the CPU.

I have a second mechanical hard drive, which I've encrypted with Bitlocker and I'd like to be able to auto-unlock it.

At the moment I've figured out a hack to do it, by running a task at system boot, that uses the bitlocker command line utility to manually unlock the drive. However this seems a very clunky way to do it.

I understand the reasoning behind this restriction, because they don't want to store decryption keys on an unencrypted drive, however in my case it doesn't really apply, as the system drive is fully encrypted, just not with Bitlocker.

I'm just wondering if there is some way to override this check, and force it to allow auto-unlock?

 

Undesired Behavior: BitLocker Automatically Unlocking System Volume

Win10 Pro, 1909

Upon restart, or cold boot from power-off condition, Bitlocker is unlocking the system volume automatically. This behavior just started tonight. From my understanding, this is not possible, LOL. I've never seen this behavior. See below for a dump of BitLocker status for the system volume C:

The machine BIOS does not have SecureBoot nor TPM. I am using only password security with BitLocker.