Bitlocker Drive Encryption Management does not detect any drives

[MHenderson]

Hello,

First off, Bitlocker has never been used on this computer. All its drives have never been encrypted. The problem is that when I open Bitlocker Drive Encryption in the Control Panel there are absolutely no drives listed at all. The area under the heading "BitLocker Drive Encryption - Hard Disk Drives" is completely blank, as is the area under "BitLocker To Go". However, Windows Explorer detects all hard and removable drives just fine.

I have tried the following:

1. chkdsk /r (no problems found)
2. sfc /scannnow (no problems found)
3. rebuilding the MBR with Comodo Cleaning Essentials (which didn't quite like the one I had) after aswMBR found no problem
4. repairing/resetting file and registry ownership and permissions to defaults using SubInACL scripts for registry and Tweaking.com for files. (This did fix a few minor nagging problems I had, by the way)
5. a clean boot
6. anti-malware scans (including several offline rescue CD's like Kaspersky, Comodo, ESET and AVG)
7. creating a new user account with admin privileges and trying from there
8. trying to trace file and registry activity with Sysinternals Process Monitor (but I don't really understand what to look for, or what most the results in the listing mean, good or bad)
9. A repair installation/inplace upgrade after a clean boot (this was a problem)

The repair installation fails and aborts quickly with the following error message:

"Setup was unable to determine if BitLocker Drive Encryption is in use"

My hard drive has only two partitions, c: and d:, as reported by Windows disk management. Also, there has never been any dual-booting, just the one Windows operating system.

Why is this happening, what's broken or corrupt? How do I get Bitlocker to detect the drives? Thanks for any help you can offer because I'm stumped and I really, really do not want to go through the time consuming nightmare of a clean OS install, followed by dozens of program re-installations that will take days.

Regards

 

[MHenderson]

Is there anyone here who can help me? Thanks.

 

[Libertarian]

I had the same problem. Finally found the solution on another forum.

Bitlocker only works on basic volumes. Yours are probably dynamic volumes.

Thanks to the original response from Vincent Hu.

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...dynamic-disk?forum=winservergen&prof=required

You'll have to back all the data off the drive, convert it to a basic drive, then move your data back.

 

[MHenderson]

Thanks for the reply. I ended up replacing the HDD with a new SSD and replacing the power supply to fix everything. The hard drive was almost five years old anyway, and in the end it appears that a flakey five volt power supply had caused the computer to crash many, many times before I thought of testing the power supply. By that time, the corruption to the Windows file system was so severe that even a repair installation of Windows was impossible, so the only realistic solution, with the knowledge I had, was to start over with new hardware. I guess we will never know if checking to see if the disks were somehow changed to being Dynamic by all the corruption would have helped the repair installation get past the BitLocker road block.