Windows 10: Problems encrypting Win10 drive on dual-boot laptop

I recently had to travel, and several times had to leave my laptop unattended. This made me realize how vulnerable it was to theft, so I have decided to encrypt the drive, or at least my personal files on the drive.

The laptop (a Dell Latitude E6430) has Windows 10 Pro and Linux Fedora 28 already installed on separate drives. I've already encrypted my home folder on the Linux drive. The Linux partition shares a "data" partition formatted NTFS on the same drive that I do not wish to encrypt.

Encrypting the Linux home folder involved several steps, but the process was relatively straightforward. I'm having a lot of issues encrypting the Windows partition. I have enabled TPM and Secure Boot in the UEFI, but still cannot enable Bitlocker. Every time I try I get a message to the effect that the C: drive cannot be automatically unlocked. Googling for the error so far hasn't produced any positive results.

I also tried enabling NTFS encryption, but the process started throwing up errors when it couldn't encrypt certain files. Presumably this is because those files are in use. Can I safely encrypt my home folder while logged in as another user (this is what I had to do in Linux)?

:)

 

Dual-boot Win10/7 or go back to Win 7

I run a dual boot of win7 and win10.
I got 2x2TB barracudas and 2x512GB barracudas.
Unfortunately I once used the 512GB drives as raid0, just to fool around and so.
Got win 7 through an Acronis backup on the 2TB drive which runs fine, but used the raid for win8.1, again to fool around with.
Took some hassle to remove that dual boot since I didn't liked 8.1. But now win10 on the raid, still fooling around.

Takes some work to get things corrected if I want to move win10 to a different drive, but that's ok.
Just a bit too lazy to get an extra drive, and curious to see how long this inefficient raid setup will do actually. Only had to do a drive repair once, after installing win10 and some bsod (due to my own fault).

So my advice is to buy an extra drive, a sata3 2TB drive or whatever you can afford, and put it in dual boot.
The nice thing about extra drives is that they last you longer because you will use 1 of them for most of the time, leaving the others reasonably intact.
Windows 10 runs dual boot just as with previous versions, so shouldn't pose a problem.

 

Datalock laptop encryption?

AFAIK, most encryptions like this change the boot sector of the hard drive to include their software encryption. So when the drive is booted, it won't boot without first entering a username and password to unlock the drive.

As I mentioned above, it asks your for a username and password, which will unlock the drive before booting Windows.

Anything is possible, but it certainly makes it a hell of a lot harder, and your normal user would not be able to do it. Since the entire drive is encrypted, even if they put it in another computer, the data would not be accesable unless they knew the encryption key.

 

Dual Boot Win7 & Win10

Here are my steps for dual booting:

• Create a system image - store it on an external drive
  
  
• Disconnect from the Internet and stay disconnected - part of the install asks about connecting
  - do NOT connect just yet.
  
  
• Create the space for the 2nd OS.
  This is tricky - drives initialized as MBR can only have 4 partitions (an extended partition allows for more),
  many OEMs create 4 primary parts and you have to adjust their disk schema.
  
  Post a Disk Management screen shotClose the left and right panes
  The columns should also be stretched to clearly show the values, most important is the Status column
  If you have many drives, you might have to adjust the middle separator and drag the bottom edge of the window down to show the maximum information.
  Then in the View menu, pick Top and change it to disk list - no need to post a pic - just note the initialized format (MBR | GPT) and post the information.
  
• Unless the 2nd OS will be used on a daily basis, keep the space to a minimum.
  Win10 + pgms on my machine takes up about 15 GB.
  I don't use Win10TP as my main OS - that's Win8.1, so data isn't a concern.
  30 - 50 GB is more than sufficient.
  
  
• Once the space is available - take your time here - there are traps with MBR disks.
  If your disk is initialized GPT, no problem - easy! But... MBR - make sure you know what you're doing.
  Just free up enough unallocated space,
  -> do not create a partition and do not format the space.
  
  
• When you're ready to install Win10, use a disc to avoid EFI issues.
  
  • Boot to the Win10 install disc (see your machine documentation on accessing the Boot Order menu at startup)
    
    +editA
    These steps are probably NOT necessary, it was an afterthought when I installed Win10 the 3rd time as a dual boot to Vista. That is when I noticed the Win10 page file on my Vista boot drive - which caused Vista a bit of a problem (temporary page file created - yada, yada, yada) - I recreated the Win10 page file on it's own partition and then reallocated the Vista page file for good measure.
    
    At the first Win10 install screen, Press Shift+F10
    Then enter these commands in the Console window
    
    ^^ denotes comment, not a command
    Launch Diskpart
    lis vol
    
    ^^ remove the drive letters from all drives
    ^^ it's easier if you disconnect external drives that aren't needed for this exercise.
    
    sel vol #
    remove letter=
    ^^ specify the letter that was shown for that volume in the lis vol command
    ^^ repeat this (select volume, remove letter=) until there are no volumes with letters shown in lis vol
    lis vol
    exit
    close the Command prompt with the X in the upper right hand corner
    
    You should be back in the Win10 install now.-editA
    
    
  • Answer the questions as if you were doing a clean installation (language, region, etc)
    
    
  • Choose a custom install
    When it asks you where you want to install, choose the unallocated space
    Let the install complete, the rest should be easy.

+editB
When Win10 boots up, you shouldn't see any other drives - this is good.
Configure the volumes for each OS - I suggest that you keep the two OSes separate, only expose the volumes you need to for each OS. Your Win7 should see everything except the Win10 volumes. Your Win10 should only see volumes you'll use in testing (i.e. what ever you create on the currently new and blank SSD).
If you need data from your existing Win7 install, it's probably better to copy what you need than to expose your good data to Tech Preview code.
-editB

When Win7 boots up, you will see the Win10 drive - remove the letter from that drive. Keep your system separate.

If at any step above you need some help, please ask ... you might have to wait, please wait. The hardest thing to do is wait and the easiest thing to do is "ooops, but I thought you meant...."

I think I remembered all of the steps I took - but... I'm human too *Wink