BitLocker Drive Encryption - Internal Data Hard Drives - Turn On or Off

Hello Santosh, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You may need to use the Clean or Clean All command on the USB flash drive first, then see if you may be able to format it.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Good point! The DM tools are the first place to start with. The flash drive will be seen as a removable device there. You may see the H,I or L drive letter used for it as typically assigned by Windows.

Hello Jabi, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Without the password or recovery key to import back, you will not be able to access the hard drive. In this case, you would only be able to format the hard drive to be able to use it again.

You're welcome Jabi. Sorry that this is the case.

I have to wonder if any files can be recovered at all using a data recovery program or even a live Linux distro like ubuntu, Puppy, or Knoppix. Or you are simply locked out totally with no options available? This is one I may end up trying by locking up a flash and then booting live to see anything is recoverable here.

Hello BOM,

If BitLocker fails or is interrupted while encrypting the partition, then you may end up needing to format that partition to be able to use it again.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

The process can be rather sensitive if you intend to run any resource intensive programs running and may want to shedule it to run while you are planning to let the system sit idle or with little activity during this time period to insure the best results and of course avoid any mishaps.

Best preparation? Have everything you plan to see encrypted backed up at least temporarily somewhere else in the event the encryption process fails for some reason. You don't want to lose everything if a reformat becomes necessary.