Bitlockertogo

WARNING - Biglockertogo only supports FAT formatted drives.

From reading a lot about bitlocker, the fact that the "TOGO" feature is only supported on FAT drives is downplayed. Many who encrypt NTFS drives with BITLOCKER in the expectation they will be able to read these drives on other computers will be disappointed.

I found out the hard way, I encrypted a NTFS USB external 1TB drive with bitlocker. It works fine on my Windows 7 computer. When I tried to access this drive on a Windows XP computer, I found out the sad truth. Now I will have to un-encrypt the drive to use it on the XP computer, it took 24 hours to encrypt.

Oldspook

aem said:

I thought the TO GO was to imply "removable" devices eg USB Key, USB HDD.

correction, it is a "NTFS 1TB USB external drive"

aem said:

I don't understand, so you Bitlocker your 1TB drive, removed it and plug it into an Xp machine and you cannot...i assume see anything on it? Or you get access denied message?

That's right, XP thinks it is an unformatted drive. There is no way to access a bitlocker encrypted NTFS drive except in the Windows 7 computer.

If it had been a FAT drive, there would be a small unencrypted section with the program bitlockertogo.exe. When this program runs you can enter the password to access the drive. It don't work with NTFS drives.