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Encountering the error message below implies that your computer lacks the integrated TPM security chip, thus prohibiting BitLocker usage. Nonetheless, you can resolve this issue simply by referring to this article to activate BitLocker on a TPM unsupported computer.
Step 2: If your computer doesn't exhibit the aforementioned error or post-resolution, upon turning on BitLocker, a window similar to the one below will emerge:
Press Enter a password.
Step 3: Input the protective password into the two empty fields, then click Next.
Step 4: Here, we will proceed to create a backup file of the password to enable password recovery for BitLocker in case of forgetting the password, for instance.
There are various methods to store the Backup file; you can store it in your Microsoft account, on a USB drive, save it as a txt file, or print it out.
Here, we will choose Save to a file (save as a txt file).
A file browsing window will appear; select the location to store the backup file and click Save. Note that you cannot save it to the drive you are encrypting. For example, if you encrypt drive C, you must save the backup file to drive D or a USB drive.
Press Next to return to the previous window and continue.
Step 5: Here, we have 2 encryption options:
- Encrypt used disk space only
- (Encrypt the entire hard drive)
If your computer is new and has no data yet, you can choose Encrypt used disk space only for quicker encryption. Otherwise, you can choose to encrypt the entire hard drive, but it will take a little longer.
Step 6: If you're using Windows 10 version 1511 or later, you'll have this additional option, which is a newer encryption mode but only available on Windows 10 version 1511 and later. However, if you choose this encryption mode, computers using older operating systems will not be able to decrypt the data if you copy it over.
So if you want to select the new encryption mode, choose New encryption mode. Otherwise, choose Compatible mode, then press Next.
Step 7: Press Continue to proceed.
A notification prompts to restart your computer. Press Restart now to restart immediately.
During the computer startup process, you'll need to enter the password created in step 3:
Upon booting into Windows, you'll notice the C drive icon with a lock symbol, indicating it's encrypted with BitLocker:
2. Encrypting data on a non-system drive
In the previous section, Mytour instructed you on encrypting data on the hard drive containing the operating system. In this section, we'll encrypt data on a regular hard drive partition, not the one containing the operating system.
Essentially, the process is similar to encrypting the drive containing the operating system.
First, right-click on the drive you want to encrypt and select Turn on BitLocker
For non-system drives, we can choose to encrypt using a smart card. However, here we still use the option to encrypt with a password. Enter the password and then press Next.
The next steps are similar to those in part 1, then wait for the encryption process to complete:
After successfully encrypting, your data drive will have a lock icon as shown below:
In addition to encrypting data drives on your computer, you can also easily encrypt USB data with BitLocker. You can refer to the guide on how to encrypt USB data with BitLocker here:
3. How to turn off BitLocker encryption in Windows
Step 1: To turn off BitLocker encryption, first unlock the data drive, then right-click on the data drive and select Manage BitLocker
Step 2: A new window will appear, click on Turn off BitLocker
A notification will appear, click Turn off BitLocker again, and you're done.
4. How to recover Bitlocker password using the Recovery Key file
As you know, when we encrypt data with BitLocker, there's a step to create a password backup file to use in case we forget the password and can't access the encrypted data. So if you find yourself in this situation, here's how we can recover the BitLocker password.
Step 1: When you open a locked data drive, a dialog box will appear to enter the unlock password. Since we've forgotten the password, we'll choose More options and then select Enter recovery key
A new dialog box appears, this is where we enter the Recovery Key from the Backup file created during the data encryption process:
Step 2: Open that backup file, inside this file is a 48-digit string of numbers, copy this string:
Paste the Recovery Key string into the dialog box and click Unlock
After opening, there will be some options available, you can close this window or click Open folder to view files to open the unlocked data drive.
So now that the data drive is unlocked, you can open it normally to view the data. If desired, you can turn off BitLocker and re-encrypt.
5. Comparing read and write speeds of the hard drive before and after encrypting data with BitLocker
You may not know, but after encrypting the hard drive data with BitLocker, the read and write speeds of the hard drive will decrease because the data copying process will undergo encryption.
To determine the exact decrease in speed, Mytour conducted a comparison test of the hard drive speed before and after encryption with BitLocker. Please follow the images below:
- Read and write speed of the SSD before and after encryption with BitLocker:
Before:
After:
- Read and write speed of the HDD before and after encryption with BitLocker:
Before:
After:
Thank you for following the article!
