Unexpected message when turning on Bitlocker Win7 Ultimate X64

[Russ Smith]

We are in the process of encrypting all our hard drives on our laptops. I've done about 20 with no problem but we have one user who we attempted to turn on and got the following message.


"Preparing your drive for BitLocker
An existing drive or unallocated free space on the hard drive will be used to enable BitLocker.

Details
Boot files will be moved to drive D:, which will become the system drive."

Currently C: is the boot drive. Why would it insist on changing that? There is 80 GB or so free on the C: drive.

Here is some related info from a Microsoft website:
“Two partitions are required to run BitLocker because pre-startup authentication and system integrity verification must occur on a separate partition from the encrypted operating system drive. This configuration helps protect the operating system and the information in the encrypted drive. In Windows Vista, the system drive must be 1.5 gigabytes (GB), but in Windows 7 this requirement has been reduced to 100 MB for a default installation. The system drive may also be used to store the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and other files that may be specific to setup or upgrade programs. Computer manufacturers and enterprise customers can also store system tools or other recovery tools on this drive, which will increase the required size of the system drive. For example, using the system drive to store Windows RE along with the BitLocker startup file will increase the size of the system drive to 300 MB. The system drive is hidden by default and is not assigned a drive letter. The system drive is created automatically when Windows 7 is installed.”

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We have not gone past this because we're concerned that we don't want the boot drive moved to D and we're not at all getting why Bitlocker is going to do that? We have Win 7 on the machine(professional) and then upgraded it to Ultimate. Per MS's site, Win 7 is supposed to by default create the 2 partitions necessary for Bitlocker, so why is it saying it's going to move bootfiles and why only on this one laptop and none of our others done the same way?

I tried Googling the message but everything I get back is related to Vista, not Win 7.

Any ideas on what this means and how we should proceed?

thank you,

Russ Smith

 

[Kaktussoft]

Post screenshot of disk management please

 

[Russ Smith]

Post screenshot of disk management please

I will try but it's not my system so I need the user to be here and then take the screenshot and mail to me.

Thanks,

 

[Kaktussoft]

Only want to know:

• What partition is ACTIVE
• What partition has win7 on it (most of the time C drive)

Both should be different! The active volume has bootmanager and bootmenu. And has the bitlocker stuff. The active volume is unencrypted.

Bitlocker software has to be loaded.... from unecrypted volume.

I think C drive is active now... that's the problem. Make "system reserved" partition ACTIVE instead. Afterwards do a "startup repair" 3 times with reboots in between. Then install bitlocker

 

[Russ Smith]

Only want to know:

• What partition is ACTIVE
• What partition has win7 on it (most of the time C drive)

Both should be different! The active volume has bootmanager and bootmenu. And has the bitlocker stuff. The active volume is unencrypted.

Bitlocker software has to be loaded.... from unecrypted volume.

I think C drive is active now... that's the problem. Make "system reserved" partition ACTIVE instead. Afterwards do a "startup repair" 3 times with reboots in between. Then install bitlocker

So you are right, there are 2 volumes showing, the OS on the C drive and that's ACTIVE, and the recovery on the D drive and that's not active.

This is different than all our other systems, not sure why, I know we re-purposed this system from a prior employee maybe somehow in that process something happened.

So I need to do a little more work i guess thanks for your help.

 

[Kaktussoft]

Just shrink C by 200MB. Make a new PRIMARY NTFS partition in the 200MB unallocated space. Mark that partition ACTIVE. No drive letter to that partition. Now do a startup repair 3 times.

Now you can install bitlocker

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/119151-system-reserved-create-using-disk-management.html option ONE
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2672-partition-volume-shrink.html