Windows 7 comes with Bitlocker which let you encrypt the whole drive and puts a lock on it so that no one can access your precious data. The drive gets locked after encryption and can only be opened after authentication.
How to encrypt the drive
Right Click on the drive you want to lock and select Turn on Bitlocker.
Select Use a password to unlock the drive and type the password.
Save the recovery key to a folder which will be used to recover the contents in case you forget the password.
The drive will be encrypted now. The time taken for encryption depends on the size of drive. Mine took the time while I wrote this post.
Now you need to provide the password before you can access the contents of the drive.
How to unlock it
When you double click the drive, you will be prompted for a password or any other method that you may have chosen to unlock this drive.
When you type in the password, the drive will be unlocked.
How to lock it
Microsoft doesn’t provide any way of locking the drive again without rebooting the computer but you can do that through Command line interface.
Run Command Prompt as administrator or else it won’t work.
Command to lock the drive is – manage-bde -lock E: forcedismount
Replace the E: with the drive letter of the drive you have locked. The drive will be locked after issuing the command. I will look for an easy way of locking the drive again but till then you can lock the drive by the above method.
Leave a comment if you need any help and I will try my best to help you.
Comments
10 responses to “Bitlocker in Windows 7 encrypts your whole drive & locks access to it”
How about to make a partion on harddisc,What I mean that to divide the (C;)to C and D without format it . how to do that?…..
Can you help me….
There are tools which can shrink and extend the volume of a partition. Vista & Win 7 comes along with such tools but personally I have never tried that. Make sure you do a backup in case anything gets screwed up.
There is no way to lock a BitLocker volume you have acccessed other than to shut down the entire computer. This is an extreme security voilation.
Microsoft recommends all people cease using BitLocker. Microsoft will not stand behind BitLocker as a security system as it is not possible to lock a volume.
Everyone has been warned.
You can lock it again by issuing the command on command prompt when running it as an administrator.
dear seniors i am having problem in win7 please help. when i try to unlock my drive drive from bitlocker my computer hang. i am unable to open my drives so please help if there any other solution to remove bitlocker protection. thankx in advance
waiting for ur support…………….Raj
I think your best would be to contact Microsoft support in this regard.
dears, i have forget my password to unlock the drive what should i do now? i reinstalled the windows 7 but that remained the same one. am also amdmin
I would say contact Microsoft about this. Without decryption key you just can’t recover it back. You must have backed up key somewhere, try recalling
Dears, I have locked my drive in seven with Bitlocker, and now I want to use that drive in Ubuntu, but my drive is not in media list,
what should I do now?
Best Regards
manage-bde -lock E: forcedismount
manage-bde -lock E: this command also lock the drive beacuse forcedismount is invalid syntax.