How to Lock an Unlocked BitLocker Drive
Currently, if you unlock a drive that has been locked with Bitlocker, you will need to either restart explorer.exe or reboot your PC. Neither of these appeal to me so I found a way of adding "Lock" to the context menu menu which, when clicked, re-locks the drive.
WarningInvolves editing the registry. Proceed with care if new to registry editing and back up your registry before hand
Here's How:
1. Open Notepad and paste this below in it.Now, when you right click the drive, you'll see "Lock". Clicking this will re-lock your drive.
NOTE: Replace x: with the drive letter you wish to apply it to.
manage-bde -lock x: -ForceDismount2. Save the file as lock.bat to your desktop, then move it into your C:\Windows folder.
3. Open regedit and navigate to: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell
4. In the left pane of regedit, right click on shell, click on New and Key, type runas, and press enter.
NOTE: This key may already exist with the value of TakeOwnership. If it does, name the new key runas(2) instead.
5. In the right pane of runas or runas(2), double click on (default) to modify, type in Lock and click on OK.
6. In the left pane of regedit, right click on runas or runas(2), click on New and Key, type command and press enter.
7. In the right pane of command, double click on (default) to modify, type in C:\Windows\lock.bat and click on OK.
8. In the right pane of runas or runas(2), click on a empty space and click on New and String Value, type in AppliesTo and press enter.
9. Double click on AppliesTo to modify, type in X: and click on OK.
NOTE: Replace X: with the same drive location as you did in step 1.
10. Close regedit.
Micrsoft needs to fix this IMO but this is an excellent work around. Props to "Jonathon" for coming up with the original method.
Related Tutorials
- Add "Lock Drive" to Unlocked BitLocker Drives Context Menu in Windows 7 and Windows 8
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