BitLocker - unintelligible gibberish

[MikeLincoln]

Hey all-

Wondering if anyone has any idea what could be going on here. I admit, I don't know a lot about BitLocker so apologies if this sounds stupid.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on an HP Pavilion w/4GB of RAM. I keep all of my backup data on a 320GB WD Passport portable (FAT32 file structure), and decided to use BitLocker to encrypt the contents. The drive had about 50-100GB of free space on it.

So, I encrypted it using a password, and printed out the recovery key. It took about 8 or so hours to do the encryption, and said Encryption complete. (no cable disconnections that I know of) When I tried to access the drive again, it asked me for the PW, I gave it, and everything seemed fine. However, when I opened up the drive, all of the folders and files were just complete gibberish (attached screenshot). In addition, it says that there is only a half a meg free on the drive. Of course, I freaked out, saw that there was a decryption option, and ran that. Seemed like everything was working, waited another 10 hours or so for decryption, and it said Decryption complete. (again, no cable disconnections that I know of)

But now, the drive is still like this, unintelligible gibberish. I can't turn on BitLocker again b/c there is no free space, and I'm afraid to touch anything else b/c I fear something has gone terribly awry.

Can anyone help? This data is extremely important to me, and of course, I do not have a backup.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[logicearth]

That does not look good...that is a sign the data was not decrypted...Did you use Bitlocker or Bitlocker-To-Go? You might have just lost all the information there, I know of no way to recovery from that. But probably next time when you play with such a feature, test it out on none important data or systems.

 

[Frostmourne]

FAT32? That might be the reason. I think all your data is gone. You should have used NTFS.

 

[patwhatsthat]

Not sure if this will help but take a look at this Scenario 16: Using the BitLocker Repair Tool to Recover a Drive