BitLocker Drive Encryption - Windows 7 Drive - Turn On or Off with no TPM

after thoroughly examining the bios still does nothing ..even switching the usb stick around does nothing so stupid

An associate encrypted the bosses C: (win7 ultimate) no errors & upon followup it looks like everything is OK but both the gold locked & silver unlocked icons show-up on the drive at the same time.

Please Help,

Thank you, Brink

No we haven't turned off bit-locker because the user doesn't want us to do anything to his PC unless we can show him there is a problem.

It seems like every thing is OK with his HD & that bit-locker is working. He just wants an explanation of why his icon is different from the other users.

So I am looking for some way to prove something is wrong so he will let us have his PC long enough to t-shoot.

Has anyone ever seen this before or knows definitively what both locked & unlocked icons on the same drive means. Are there some diags or tools we can use to show something is wrong.

Thanks,

I have C: partition with two Operating Systems on it:
1. Windows 7 Ultimate;
2. Ubuntu.
I don't have TPM on my PC, so I would use USB Recovery Key option in BitLocker.

Can I safely turn on BitLocker on C: partition using 16 GB USB flash drive which has >5 GB free space? Or USB flash drive should be empty?
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Also, I have D: partition with documents.

Can I safely use the same USB flash drive to turn on BitLocker on D: partition?

I ask because I want to be sure that this can't cause any damage to my Hard Disk, supposing that I use BitLocker properly.

I know this thread is now very old, but I may be able to save others from the very frustrating few hours I have had with error messages about the USB drive.

After checking that my new HP PC can boot from USB, trying and reformatting many USB drives, trying different ports, trying shutdown/start instead of reboot I still had the unable to read key file error.

I then went through the BIOS options again and under 'Security -> Secure Boot Configuration' I found an option for 'Allow Fast Boot'. Once I had set this to 'Disable' the problems were solved.

It would appear that under the fast boot scenario, the PC was starting Windows faster than the USB drive could be initialised.